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This broadcast was recorded in one, 60-minute segment.
Introduction: In FTR #‘s 724, 725, 732, 745 and 755, we have detailed the fascist and far right-wing ideology, associations and politics of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks.
Lionized by the so-called progressive sector, as well as mainstream media sources like The New York Times and Der Spiegel, Assange’s true colors and fascist politics and associations have emerged on a larger stage.
As the Trump campaign evolves, a major alliance between “The Donald’s” Trumpenkampfverbande and the Assange organization has developed. Obviously serving as a dirty-tricks cadre for the GOP, Assange is working hard to destroy Hillary Clinton with leaked documents intended to torpedo her campaign.
Assange–not even an American citizen–is manifesting what we termed “technocratic fascism,” arrogating to himself the right to determine the results of the American Presidential election. Quoting from a seminal article by David Golumbia: ” . . . Hackers (“civic,” “ethical,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hacktivists, WikiLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anonymous “members,” even Edward Snowden himself walk hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to contribute to the political world, but that the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the political world is broken, they appear to think (rightly, at least in part), and the solution to that, they think (wrongly, at least for the most part), is for programmers to take political matters into their own hands. . . .”
Beginning with analysis of the alleged Russian authorship of the hack of the Democratic National Committee on the eve of the Democratic Convention in July, we highlight disturbing indications that the hack is actually a false flag operation, setting the stage for some very dangerous developments.
In that context, we recall that one of the terms we have applied to Edward Snowden is “The Obverse Oswald.” We strongly suspect that Snowden, in Russia and working for a computer firm, may have had something to do with this.
The (frankly lame) framing of Russia for the DNC hack reminds us of the process of “painting Oswald Red.” We have covered this in numerous broadcasts, including The Guns of November, Part 1, AFA #15 and FTR #‘s 777 and 876. (An excellent book on the JFK assassination that presents an excellent breakdown of “the painting of Oswald Red” is JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters.)
Much of the broadcast highlights WikiLeaks’ efforts on behalf of the Trump campaign, detailing aspects of Assange’s presentation of Hillary Clinton’s e‑mails.
We note the powerful resonance between Assange’s presentations and elements of major right-wing attacks on Clinton.
Assange/WikiLeaks’ points of attack on Hillary Clinton:
- Focus on the Clinton Foundation, synchronizing with Koch brothers’ protege Peter Schweizer’s book Clinton Cash.
- Imply that Clinton murdered a DNC volunteer named Seth Rich. Trump dirty tricks specialist Roger Stone is writing a book blaming the Clintons for murdering JFK, Jr.–Hillary the murderer!
- Obliquely endorse Donald Trump.
- Disclose the Social Security and credit card numbers of Democratic Party contributors, opening them up to retribution. Stone threatened to disclose the hotel room numbers of anti-Trump GOP delegates, implying that they could be subject to violence. The WikiLeaks Clinton e‑mail dump: ” . . . . The emails include unencrypted, plain-text listings of donor emails addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, passport numbers, and credit card information. WikiLeaks proudly announced the data dump in a single tweet. . . .” Might this have had something to do with the murder of Seth Rich?
- Are apparently being conducted in concert with Roger Stone, with whom Assange is apparently in contact!
Further developing the right-wing, fascist and anti-Semitic aspects of Assange/WikiLeaks, we note that Assange responded to critics of his efforts against Clinton and on behalf of Trump/Stone with an anti-Semitic tweet.
Among Assange’s champions are the fascist National front in France and the U.K. Independence Party, which may well have set the stage for the fragmentation of Great Britain with the Brexit campaign.
It would come as a distasteful surprise to the Bernie Sanders crowd, to whom Assange has catered, to learn that Assange is a champion of free-market economics, synthesizing the Chicago and Austrian schools of economics.
Much of the latter part of the broadcast reviews information about Assange, Snowden and Citizen Greenwald’s right-wing and fascist manifestations.
Program Highlights Include:
- Comparison of the racist rhetoric of Snowden and Assange Presidential candidate of choice Ron Paul with that of Donald Trump.
- Citizen Greenwald’s anti-immigrant rhetoric.
- Review of the back-cover promotion of Serpent’s Walk in the context of the Trump campaign.
- A bullet-point analysis that connects many of the dots in this concatenation.
1. An interesting piece by Dr. Sandro Gaycken, a Berlin-based former ‘hacktivist’ who now advises NATO and the German government on cyber-security matters, makes the case that the evidence implicating Russia was very much the type of evidence a talented team could spoof. He also notes that some of the tools used in the hack were the same used last year when Angela Merkel’s computer was hacked and used to infect other computers at the Bundestag. That hack was also blamed on Russian hackers. But, again, as the article below points out, when the evidence for who is responsible is highly spoofable, confidently assigning blame is almost too easy:
Dr. Sandro Gaycken is the Director of the Digital Society Institute, a former hacktivist, and a strategic advisor to NATO, some German DAX-companies and the German government on cyber matters.
The hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) definitely looks Russian. The evidence is compelling. The tools used in the incident appeared in previous cases of alleged Russian espionage, some of which appeared in the German Bundestag hack. The attackers, dubbed Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear, have been known for years and have long been rumored to have a Russian connection. Other indicators such as IP addresses, language and location settings in the documents’ metadata and code compilation point to Russia. The Kremlin is also known to practice influence operations, and a leak before the Democrats’ convention fits that profile as does laundering the information through a third party like Wikileaks. Finally, the cui bono makes sense as well; Russia may favor Donald Trump given his Putin-friendly statements and his views on NATO.
Altogether, it looks like a clean-cut case. But before accusing a nuclear power like Russia of interfering in a U.S. election, these arguments should be thoroughly and skeptically scrutinized.
A critical look exposes the significant flaws in the attribution. First, all of the technical evidence can be spoofed. Although some argue that spoofing the mound of uncovered evidence is too much work, it can easily be done by a small team of good attackers in three or four days. Second, the tools used by Cozy Bear appeared on the black market when they were first discovered years ago and have been recycled and used against many other targets, including against German industry. The reuse and fine-tuning of existing malware happens all the time. Third, the language, location settings, and compilation metadata can easily be altered by changing basic settings on the attacker’s computer in five minutes without the need of special knowledge. None of the technical evidence is convincing. It would only be convincing if the attackers used entirely novel, unique, and sophisticated tools with unmistakable indicators pointing to Russia supported by human intelligence, not by malware analysis.
The DNC attackers also had very poor, almost comical, operational security (OPSEC). State actors tend to have a quality assurance review when developing cyberattack tools to minimize the risk of discovery and leaving obvious crumbs behind. Russian intelligence services are especially good. They are highly capable, tactically and strategically agile, and rational. They ensure that offensive tools are tailored and proportionate to the signal they want to send, the possibility of disclosure and public perception, and the odds of escalation. The shoddy OPSEC just doesn’t fit what we know about Russian intelligence.
The claim that Guccifer 2.0 is a Russian false flag operation may not hold up either. If Russia wanted to cover up the fact it had hacked the DNC, why create a pseudonym that could only attract more attention and publish emails? Dumping a trove of documents all at once is less valuable than cherry picking the most damaging information and strategically leaking it in a crafted and targeted fashion, as the FSB, SVR or GRU have probably done in the past. Also, leaking to Wikileaks isn’t hard. They have a submission form.
Given these arguments, blaming Russia is not a slam dunk. Why would a country with some of the best intelligence services in the world commit a whole series of really stupid mistakes in a highly sensitive operation? Why pick a target that has a strong chance of leading to escalatory activity when Russia is known to prefer incremental actions over drastic ones? Why go through the trouble of a false flag when doing nothing would have been arguably better? Lastly, how does Russia benefit from publicly backing Donald Trump given that Republicans have been skeptical of improving relations?
The evidence and information in the public domain strongly suggests Russia was behind the DNC hack, even though Russian intelligence services would have had the choice of not making it so clear cut given what we know about their tools, tactics, procedures, and thinking.
The DNC hack leads to at least four “what if” questions, each with its own significant policy consequences. First, if Russia had poor operational security and misjudged its target, it needs to be educated about the sensitivity of certain targets in its favorite adversary countries to avoid a repeat of this disaster. Second, if Russia deliberately hacked the DNC to leak confidential information, it would represent a strategic escalation on behalf of the Kremlin and the world would need to prepare for difficult times ahead. Third, if the breach and leak were perpetrated by a bunch of random activists using the pseudonym “Guccifer 2.0“, it would be the first instance of non-state actors succeeding in creating a global incident with severe strategic implications, demanding more control of such entities and a much better design of escalatory processes among nations. Finally, it is entirely possible that this was a false flag operation by an unknown third party to escalate tensions between nuclear superpowers. If this is the case, this party has to be uncovered. . . .
2. More about cyber-security experts who view the “Russian intelligence” hacking of DNC computers as suspiciously transparent:
. . . . But security expert Jeff Carr thought the smoke off this smoking-gun was a bit too thick. In his minority report, he asks: what kind of spy ring tags their stolen docs before releasing them under a cover?
“Raise your hand if you think that a GRU or FSB officer would add Iron Felix’s name to the metadata of a stolen document before he released it to the world while pretending to be a Romanian hacker. Someone clearly had a wicked sense of humor,” he wrote. . . . .
. . . . Crowdstrike president Shawn Henry is dubious. “I don’t know what kind of foreign intelligence service conducting a covert operation wants to be found,” he said on Thursday, but added that CrowdStrike picked up the DNC hack within 48 hours and that it “wasn’t difficult.” . . . .
3a. Check out the latest member of Donald Trump’s opposition research team. It’s an informal membership:
Assange says the government likely won’t indict “war hawk” Hillary Clinton, but it has more than enough evidence
Julian Assange, editor-in chief of WikiLeaks, says the whistle-blowing journalism organization will soon be publishing unreleased emails from Hillary Clinton.
Clinton, the Democratic Party presidential front-runner, has been under criminal investigation by the FBI for using a personal email account on a private server in her home that contained top-secret information.
Assange doesn’t believe that Clinton will be indicted, but argues that the government has more than enough evidence, in both her emails and in the dealings of the Clinton Foundation, if it were truly committed to doing so.
“We have upcoming leaks in relation to Hillary Clinton,” Assange said. “WikiLeaks has a very big year ahead.” . . . .
3b. Behold the latest chapter in Julian Assange’s quest to get Donald Trump elected President: WikiLeaks just released a new searchable database of Democratic National Committee emails. Since the database consists of 19,252 emails so, as you can imagine, there’s quite a bit of content available to the public. Content like innocent donors’ credit card, social security, and passport numbers:
. . . . But not always. The organization has also used that tradition of transparency for less just causes, like today when the site published 19,252 emails from top US Democratic National Committee members,many of which included personal information about innocent donors including credit card, social security numbers, and passport numbers.
If you visit the WikiLeaks DNC emails website, you can browse the emails using a simple boolean search.Typing a word like “contribution” will actually turn up hundreds of results. The emails include unencrypted, plain-text listings of donor emails addresses, home addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, passport numbers, and credit card information. WikiLeaks proudly announced the data dump in a single tweet. . . .
The new leak is part of the organization’s ongoing Hillary Leaks series, which launched in March as a searchable archive of more than 30,000 emails and attachments sent to and from Clinton’s private email server, while she was Secretary of State. The original email dump included documents from June 2010 to August 2014. The new release includes emails from January 2015 to May 2016. . . .
3c.While Assange hasn’t come out and endorsed Trump yet, he definitely doesn’t seem very keen on criticizing him:
. . . . Against this backdrop, Peston wondered if Assange would prefer that Donald Trump, the GOP presumptive nominee, wins the White House in November. . . .
“Trump is a completely unpredictable phenomenon—you can’t predict what he would do in office . . .
3d. Donald Trump once again is hinting at violence as the solution to a Hillary Clinton presidency along with Roger Stone suggesting that the election will be rigged and the government invalid and Julian Assange making it clear that he wants to do whatever he can to ensure Hillary Clinton loses and has more documents that he’s sitting on for the right “October Surprise” moment to politically damage her, it’s probably worth noting that Roger Stone just claimed he’s in contact with Assange.
Wikileaks is now clearly working as the unofficial hacking squad for the Trump campaign’s dirty tricks team. It makes sense that Assange would be in communication with the campaign’s unofficial dirty tricks organizer.
Stone is a master dirty trickster,with a track record going back to the Nixon campaign. What specifically is Stone recommending to Assange regarding the nature and timing of planned leaks. Is Wikileaks going to try and help Trump trigger a bloody ‘American Spring’ this Fall? Now that the Trump campaign’s central strategy appears to be preemptively delegitimizing a Clinton presidency and/or prepping the Trump base for acts of political violence it’s a pretty big question.
Longtime Donald Trump ally Roger Stone claimed on Monday that he was in touch with the founder of Wikileaks about documents the organization plans to release to derail Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
During a Monday speech to the Southwest Broward Republican Organization, Stone was asked for his “forecast” on what the “October surprise” Wikileaks founder Julian Assange had promised to reveal about Clinton may be.
“Well, it could be any number of things,” Stone said, according to video of his remarks obtained by Media Matters. “I actually have communicated with Assange. I believe the next tranche of his documents pertain to the Clinton Foundation but there’s no telling what the October surprise may be.”
These remarks fly in the face of Stone and other Trump allies’ repeated claims that the general election results may be “rigged” in Clinton’s favor. . . .
. . . . Since late July, Stone has pushed the claim that a Clinton victory could only result from a “rigged” election system that favored her campaign. “If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government,” Stone said in a podcast with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, despite the overwhelming evidence that voter fraud is virtually nonexistent in the United States. . . .
3e. Assange strongly hinted that the source for the DNC hacks was Seth Rich, a recently murdered young DNC staffer. Also, Wikileaks just offered $20,000 for anyone with information on Rich’s murder. The Trump is–not surprisingly–endorsing this.
Rich’s family is on record as urging that Assange’s inuendos not be taken seriously.
Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks organization appear to be actively encouraging a conspiracy theory that a Democratic National Committee staffer was murdered for nefarious political purposes, perhaps by Hillary Clinton.
Seth Rich was killed last month in Washington, D.C., in an early morning shooting that police have speculated was a failed robbery. Because Rich did voter outreach for the DNC and because we live in a ridiculous world, conspiracy theorists have glommed on to a fantastical story that Rich was an FBI informant meeting with purported agents who were actually a hit team sent by Hillary Clinton. There is of course absolutely zero evidence for this and Snopes has issued a comprehensive debunking of the premise (Rich is only 27 and has only worked at the DNC since 2014 so is unlikely to be in possession of information that might take down Clinton, he was on the phone with his girlfriend at the time of the shooting and she hasn’t reported any FBI meeting, there have been a string of robberies in the area, an FBI rendezvous at 4 a.m. only happens in movies, the whole thing is batshit crazy, etc.)
The fact that the idea is so absurd, though, has not stopped Assange from suggesting that Rich was murdered for nefarious political purposes either because he was an informant for the FBI or because he may have been a source in last month’s WikiLeaks release of thousands of DNC emails. In an interview on Tuesday that was picked up by BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, Assange seemed to lend credence to the idea that Rich had been retaliated against.
“WikiLeaks never sits on material. Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks,” Assange said in an interview with the Dutch television program Nieuwsuur. “There’s a 27-year-old who works for the DNC who was shot in the back, murdered, just a few weeks ago, for unknown reasons as he was walking down the streets in Washington.”
When Assange was questioned as to what the hell he was talking about, he said, “I’m suggesting that our sources take risks and they are—they become concerned to see things occurring like that.”
The implication here is that either Assange’s sources are fearful that Rich might have been a whistleblower to the FBI or someone else and was taken out by Clinton or others—as the conspiracy theory suggests—or that he was a whistleblower for Assange’s group and was murdered because of that.
When the interviewer asked Assange if he was implying that Rich was a WikiLeaks source, he said, “We don’t comment on who our sources are.”
On Tuesday, WikiLeaks sent out a tweet offering a $20,000 reward for information about Rich’s murder. . . .
4. With ‘accidentally’ tweeting neo-Nazi memes the hot new thing in 2016 thanks to the Donald Trump campaign, it looks like one of Trump’s unofficial campaign surrogates decided to get ‘accidentally’ trendy:
If any one form of discriminatory social media expression has been on the rise in recent months, it’s been anti-Semitism.
The Donald Trump presidential campaign’s well-documented white nationalist and Neo-Nazi following continues to bring such hatred to the forefront. Trump himself had even retweeted things from members of the “white genocide” movement, and in June, the campaign tweeted out an anti-Semitic meme that originated from the alt-right fever swamps of social media.
On Saturday, a completely different organization seemed to dip its toes in those waters, too. Wikileaks started tweeting about (((echoes))), and it’s generated a great amount of controversy.
It’s one of the increasingly well-known methods of harassment used by anti-Jewish racists on Twitter, which has exploded into wider visibility in recent months―tweeting at Jews, and bracketing their names with two or three parentheses on either side.
It’s intended both as a signal to other anti-Semites and neo-Nazis, to highlight the target’s Jewish heritage (or perceived Jewish heritage, since racists aren’t always the sharpest or most concerned with accuracy), and track them on social media, making it even easier for other anti-Semites to join in on the abuse. . . .
That’s where Wikileaks comes in. On Saturday, amid the group’s high-profile dump of thousands and thousands of emails from the Democratic National Committee, its Twitter account said something very suggestive about its critics. The tweet has since been deleted, going against Wikileaks’ perceived notion of radical transparency. Nevertheless, screenshotters never forget.
It’s not exactly the most coherent tweet, but the thrust is nonetheless pretty clear: Wikileaks accused most of its critics of having the (((echoes))) brackets around their names, as well as “black-rimmed glasses,” statements that many interpreted, plainly enough, as “most of our critics are Jews.” . . . .
. . . . It’s also been maintaining a pretty aggressive public relations posture regarding these latest leaks. It threatened MSNBC host Joy Reid for tweeting that she planned to discuss an “affinity” between the group and the Russian government on her show, saying “our lawyers will monitor your program.” . . . .
5. The National Front and the UK Independence Party are among Assange’s big supporters.
. . . . Meanwhile, he [Assange] has attracted support from powerful anti‑U.S. actors in his battle with Swedish authorities. Two right-wing political parties in Europe that are skeptical of Washington . . . the far-right National Front in France and the pro-Brexit U.K. Independence Party, have called for their countries to grant Assange asylum so he can avoid questioning by Sweden. . . .
6. Among his many delightful qualities, Assange is an advocate of neoliberal economic theory. We wonder what the Bernie Bots would think of this?!
“Julian Assange–Also Neoliberal Utopian” by Ramona; libcom.org; 8/27/2012.
. . . . Assange’s most lengthy articulation of his own politics comes in a lengthy interview with Forbes. Asked “Would you call yourself a free market proponent?”, Assange replies “Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets”. . . . How does Wikileaks fit into this scenario? For Assange, through the act of leaking information, Wikileaks is providing better information in order for the market of international politics to work better. The question of informational asymmetry is a complex one in neoliberal circles, with a long history. Whereas neoliberalism in the variant of the Chicago School of Economics tends towards a model of equilibrium where actors have perfect information about the market, the Austrian school of Economics, favoured by the more radical anarcho-capitalist believe that information is unevenly distributed throughout a market system, and that to increase overall information enables better price setting thus improving the efficency of the market.
Assange’s philosophy here blends Austrian and Chicago School approaches. . . .
7a. Eddie the Friendly Spook Snowden and Julian Assange are big fans of Ron Paul. It is worth weighing Ron Paul’s pronouncements in light of Donald Trump’s candidacy and Assange’s more or less open backing of Donald Trump:
“Baltimore & The Walking Dead” by Mark Ames; Pando Daily; 5/1/2015.
. . . . In 1992, the most famous libertarian of all, Ron Paul, was still between Congressional stints when [the riots in] Los Angeles erupted, but he did run a profitable libertarian newsletter, “The Ron Paul Political Report,” to keep his ideas alive. Shortly after the LA riots, Ron Paul put out a “Special Issue on Racial Terrorism”offering his libertarian analysis of what he termed black “terrorism”:“The criminals who terrorize our cities—in riots and on every non-riot day—are not exclusively young black males, but they largely are. As children, they are trained to hate whites, to believe that white oppression is responsible for all black ills, to ‘fight the power,’ to steal and loot as much money from the white enemy as possible.
“The cause of the riots is plain: barbarism. If the barbarians cannot loot sufficiently through legal channels (i.e., the riots being the welfare-state minus the middle-man), they resort to illegal ones, to terrorism. Trouble is, few seem willing to stop them. The cops have been handcuffed. . . .
. . . .“We are constantly told that it is evil to be afraid of black men, but it is hardly irrational. Black men commit murders, rapes, robberies, muggings, and burglaries all out of proportion to their numbers.”
“I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in [major U.S. cities] are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.” A few months later, in October 1992, Dr. Paul explained how he taught his own family—presumably including his favorite son, Rand Paul—how to defend themselves and even murder what Dr. Paul called “hip-hop” carjackers, “the urban youth who play unsuspecting whites like pianos”:
“What can you do? More and more Americans are carrying a gun in the car. An ex-cop I know advises that if you have to use a gun on a youth, you should leave the scene immediately, disposing of the wiped off gun as soon as possible. Such a gun cannot, of course, be registered to you, but one bought privately (through the classifieds, for example.).
Beyond that, the Libertarian Party’s political solution to African-American poverty and injustice was to abolish all welfare programs, public schools, and anti-discrimination laws like the Civil Rights Act. This was the solution promoted by an up-and-coming libertarian, Jacob Hornberger—who this week co-hosted an event with Ron Paul and Glenn Greenwald. Hornberger believes that 19th century antebellum slave-era America was “the freest society in history”. . .
7c. David Duke has been a high-profile supporter of Trump, characterizing him in much the same context as he characterized Ron Paul, Snowden and
“Top 10 Racist Ron Paul Friends, Supporters” by Casey Gane-McCalla”; News One; 12/27/2011.
. . . . 6. David Duke
David Duke is a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and candidate for Governor of Louisiana. Duke is also a New World Order conspiracy theorist who believes that Jews control the Federal Reserve. On his website, Duke proudly boasts about the endorsements and kind words that Paul gave him in his newsletters and in turn endorses Paul for president:Duke’s platform called for tax cuts, no quotas, no affirmative action, no welfare, and no busing…
To many voters, this seems like just plain good sense. Duke carried baggage from his past, the voters were willing to overlook that. If he had been afforded the forgiveness an ex-communist gets, he might have won.
…David Broder, also of the Post and equally liberal, writing on an entirely different subject, had it right: ‘No one wants to talk about race publicly, but if you ask any campaign consultant or pollster privately, the sad reality that a great many working-class and middle class white Americans are far less hostile to the rich and their tax breaks than they are to the poor and minorities with their welfare and affirmative action programs.”
Liberals are notoriously blind to the sociological effects of their own programs. David Duke was hurt by his past. How many more Dukes are waiting in the wings without such a taint?
“Duke lost the election,” it said, “but he scared the blazes out of the Establishment.” In 1991, a newsletter asked, “Is David Duke’s new prominence, despite his losing the gubernatorial election, good for anti-big government forces?” The conclusion was that “our priority should be to take the anti-government, anti-tax, anti-crime, anti-welfare loafers, anti-race privilege, anti-foreign meddling message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.”
Duke also gave advice to Paul on his website, saying:
What must Paul do to have any real chance of winning or making a bigger impact? I think he should do exactly what I did in Louisiana, and for Ron Paul to follow exactly the same advice Ron Paul gave in his newsletters for others, take up my campaign issues with passion and purpose.
Could it be that Paul is taking Duke’s advice by hiding the racist “baggage from his past” in a more consistent package of “freedom?” . . .
7c. Snowden’s leaking journalist of choice–Glenn Greenwald–is also worth pondering in this regard.
His observations on immigration sound JUST like Donald Trump.
. . . . On certain issues, though, his [Greenwald’s] prose was suffused with right-wing conceits and catchphrases. One example was immigration, on which Greenwald then held surprisingly hard-line views. “The parade of evils caused by illegal immigration is widely known,” Greenwald wrote in 2005. The facts, to him, were indisputable: “illegal immigration wreaks havoc economically, socially, and culturally; makes a mockery of the rule of law; and is disgraceful just on basic fairness grounds alone.” Defending the nativist congressman Tom Tancredo from charges of racism, Greenwald wrote of “unmanageably endless hordes of people [who] pour over the border in numbers far too large to assimilate, and who consequently have no need, motivation or ability to assimilate.” Those hordes, Greenwald wrote, posed a threat to “middle-class suburban voters.” . . . .
7d. Compare, also, the back cover of Serpent’s Walk with the Trump phenomenon.
It assumes that Hitler’s warrior elite — the SS — didn’t give up their struggle for a White world when they lost the Second World War. Instead their survivors went underground and adopted some of their tactics of their enemies: they began building their economic muscle and buying into the opinion-forming media. A century after the war they are ready to challenge the democrats and Jews for the hearts and minds of White Americans, who have begun to have their fill of government-enforced multi-culturalism and ‘equality.’
8. Once again, the world of technocratic fascism should be viewed against the background of a vitally important article by David Golumbia.
THIS is what Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are doing!
“Tor, Technocracy, Democracy” by David Golumbia; Uncomputing.org; 4/23/2015.
. . . . Such technocratic beliefs are widespread in our world today, especially in the enclaves of digital enthusiasts, whether or not they are part of the giant corporate-digital leviathan. Hackers (“civic,” “ethical,” “white” and “black” hat alike), hacktivists, WikiLeaks fans [and Julian Assange et al–D. E.], Anonymous “members,” even Edward Snowden himself walk hand-in-hand with Facebook and Google in telling us that coders don’t just have good things to contribute to the political world, but that the political world is theirs to do with what they want, and the rest of us should stay out of it: the political world is broken, they appear to think (rightly, at least in part), and the solution to that, they think (wrongly, at least for the most part), is for programmers to take political matters into their own hands. . .
9. Let’s connect some dots in the “conga-line ‘ops’ ”:
- Don’t forget who else is in Russia: a very high-profile CIA officer (and former NSA contractor) named “Edward.” I think his last name begins with an “S.” We strongly suspect that the DNC hack (and very possibly the German Bundestag hack referred to in Item #1) involved The Obverse Oswald.
- It was, of course, Snowden’s journey to Russia, effected by Sarah Harrison and WikiLeaks, that put the final nail in the coffin of Barack Obama and (ahem) Hillary Clinton’s reboot with Russia.
- Connecting some more dots: The Clinton e‑mail non-scandal was an outgrowth of the Benghazi investigations (nine of them by the GOP), which grew out of the so-called Arab Spring, one of the “Conga-Line ‘Ops’ ”.
- In FTR #733 and FTR 734 we noted that Karl Rove was acting as a top advisor to the prime minister of Sweden at the time that WikiLeaks landed on Carl Lundstrom’s server.
- The launch of the Arab Spring stemmed from a leaked State Department cable.
- Karl Rove was also channeling money to Bernie Sanders.
- Assange, like Snowden, is a big Ron Paul fan.
- Ron Paul is very close to Mitt Romney.
- Although he is from Texas, Paul’s Super PAC was in Provo, Utah.
- It was largely capitalized by Peter Thiel, the largest stockholder in Palantir which–its disclaimers notwithstanding–makes the PRISM software at the core of L’Affaire Snowden.
- Peter Thiel is now a Trump delegate.
- James Comey, head of the FBI, was a big supporter of Mitt Romney.
- Comey was the former general counsel for Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, which provided a big chunk of start-up capital for Palantir.
- David Duke has been a big supporter of Trump.
- Duke has been networking with Snowden presidential selection Ron Paul for decades.
- Carl Lundstrom (who financed the Pirate Bay site at which WikiLeaks landed) arranged a speaking tour for David Duke.
- Joran Jermas aka “Israel Shamir” is part of a Russian and Ukrainian fascist milieu that networks with David Duke.
Uncle Sam and The Swastika
Well look at that: with more and more people noting the exclusive targeting of the Democrats in this year’s big hack attacks, now we have the GOP getting hit with a hack of its own. A completely inconsequential, and redacted, email hack with nothing of interest. And a hack that “Guccifer 2.0” isn’t even claiming to have done (and they aren’t exactly shy about claiming credit for these things). That’s sure convenient...for the GOP.
Beyond that, the site where the hacked documents was released, DCLeaks, appears to have Russian-connected fingerprints all over it, much like the Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear hackers allegedly behind the DNC hack. Specifically, the website is written in what appears to be non-native English speakers (who claim to be Americans) and uses email addresses and servers almost exclusively associated with Russian hackers. So, much like the Fancy Bear and Cozy Bear hack of the DNC, the people behind the DCLeaks site appear to be conspicuously trying to associate themselves with Russian hackers:
“A representative from ThreatConnect, the company that linked Fancy Bear to DCLeaks, noted that the obscure Romanian THCServer and Europe.com would be abnormal for an American hacktivist collective, and believes the sum-total is a strong circumstantial case.”
Yes, the circumstantial evidence for Russian government involvement in this hack is sum-total quite strong. If you assume they wanted to be caught:
Yes, DCLeaks was initially registered to a Romanian web server company that has only registered 14 sites in the last three years, and two those sites were also connected to the hackers believed to be behind the DNC hack (based in part on evidence provided by the German government). Oh, and DCLeaks used an email account from europe.com, which FancyBear also used. And all this is apparently strong circumstantial evidence that DCLeaks is not, as the site’s operators claim, really run by Americans but is in fact run by the same Russian hackers behind the DNC email hack. LOL!
Now, while all of this evidence does point towards the people behind the DCLeaks site being the same people, or associated with, the Fancy Bear/Cozy Bear hackers, that would ALSO suggest that the people behind DCLeaks wanted to be eventually connected with a Russian hacking outfit since the Fancy/Cozy Bear team apparently wanted investigators to conclude that they were indeed Russian hackers. As Christopher Porter, the person in charge of FireEye’s DNC email hack investigation, sees it, the reason the hackers left so much evidence that they were Russian hackers is because Russia is doing this all to show off:
“Porter believes that part of the reason that the IC and multiple cyber security researchers were able to implicate Russia is that Russia was showing off....”
Yep, if we are to assume that the DNC email hacks and the DCLeaks website are all part of the same Russian hacking team, we also have to assume that getting caught and getting all this blamed in Putin was always part of the plan. And apparently a form of bragging. Bragging in a manner where the hackers risked burning through their bag of hacker tricks:
Yes, not only did the hackers want to get caught but they apparently wanted to demonstrate to US investigators how they did it too. Ok. That’s odd.
But even if the hackers weren’t leaving a trail of their methods, the fact that they wanted to be identified as Russian operatives is enough of a head scratcher on its own. Especially considering the growing possibility of a full blown proxy war breaking out between the US and Russia over the situation in Ukraine. Why Russia would Russia want to do that? So US public support for military aid to Ukraine increases? To ensure that a Hillary Clinton presidency views Putin as a personal enemy or maybe generally trying to reinforce the image of Putin an enemy of the US’s democracy in general? If the ‘Russians did it’ theory is going to remain the dominant theory, the question of why the Kremlin would want to obviously get caught manipulating a US election in a manner designed to embarrass and piss off the likely winner has to become one of the dominant questions.
Of course, questions about who else could have the motive to fake a Russian hack with the intent of simultaneously undermining both the Clinton campaign and US/Russian relations should probably be a top question too, but that’s apparently never going to be asked. So that just leaves us with questions about why on earth the Kremlin wanted to set a trap for Russia that would obviously result in the demonization of Russia in the US press during an election season and further poison US/Russian relations. Hopefully at least that question gets asked.
Also, hopefully there will be some answers as to why the hackers were apparently allowed to hack the Democrats for over a year while US intelligence was monitoring it as the article below reports. Maybe all the hacker methods the hackers were leaving behind for investigators to discover were just so tantalizing that the investigators figured the cost of stopping the attacks wasn’t worth the benefits:
“The congressional briefing was given last summer in a secure room called a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF, to a group of congressional leaders informally known as the “Gang of Eight,” the sources said.”
Wow, so last summer, when Donald Trump made his presidential campaign announcement, the congressional “Gang of Eight” (Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell and House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner, Senator Richard Burr, Representative Devin Nunes, Senator Harry Reid, Representative Nancy Pelosi, and Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Adam Schiff of the intelligence committees) was briefed on this alleged Russian hacking operation targeting the Democrats. But since the methods used to detect the attack were so secret there was nothing the Gang of Eight could say. And then when the DNC and Clinton campaign were later notified that they were under attack, there was no mention that Russia was behind it:
So, all in all, it would appear that US intelligence agencies were well aware of this alleged Russian attack and basically allowed it to continue despite the fact that the DNC hack apparently allowed the hackers to proceed to hack other Democratic organizations. And the suspicions that Russia was behind it were so super secret and sensitive that the DNC and Clinton campaign didn’t even get to know about that angle when they were told of the act months later. Ok, that’s pretty interesting but it does again raise the question of why the Kremlin would want to get caught doing something that US intelligence found so sensitive that it couldn’t even fully inform the DNC and Clinton campaigns about it.
Does Putin would robust US public and congressional support for a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine and Syria? If so, why? Since speculation about other possible culprits, like the far-right faction within the elite hacker community (or some faction of the US security establishment that really, really, really wants a war with Russia and wouldn’t mind embarrassing Hillary and the Democrats), is totally off the table, let’s at least hope there’s speculation about why Putin wants to increase anti-Russian sentiments in the US during a critical period when a potential proxy war could break out over multiple conflicts. After all, if there’s one thing that could give US cheerleaders of proxy wars with Russia pause it’s the idea that Putin actually wants one too. So it’s a useful question considering the circumstances even if the circumstances don’t allow for asking more useful questions like who else could want a proxy war.
So let’s hope those kinds of questions get asked as “Guccifer 2.0”, or any other groups that decide to join in on the fun, continues their Democrat-targeted leaks this campaign season. Especially now that there are growing calls for reprisals against the responsible parties following Guccifer 2.0’s latest Democratic hack:
“The posting of the cellphone numbers and personal email addresses of members of Congress has national security implications. Included in the spreadsheet were the personal information of members of the House Intelligence, Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees. Foreign spies could use that information to try to intercept sensitive communications.”
Keep in mind that this hack was apparently something US intelligence agencies were monitoring and basically allowed to happen if, as the previous article suggested, the hacks of the Clinton campaign and DCCC were a result of the hack of the DNC that intelligence officials did nothing to stop. So the national security implications hopefully aren’t all that significant unless personal cellphone and email addresses are typically very difficult for foreign spies to come across. Although it might make hacking future hacks against these 200 Democratic insiders much easier for random hackers that have no government ties.
But with Steny Hoyer calling for “offensive measure” in response to the hack, and Rep Schiff (one of “Gang of Eight” who got the initial briefing last summer) calling for the Obama administration to identify the perpetrators and “levy strong consequences against those responsible,” the risk of the political dynamics created by this hack forcing the US into a cyberwar with Russia is now a real possibility. So, did Russia want a cyberwar? Because that was an obvious consequence of obviously meddling in the US election.
Also not that Rep Schiff is a vocal advocate of giving lethal military aid to Ukraine, so it will be very interesting to see if there are attempts to get the US presidential candidates to pledge to arm Ukraine as tensions with Russia become a growing factor in the elections. Was that one of the Kremlin’s goals?
So we’ll see if the narrative of these hacks ever includes speculation that goes beyond the conspicuous Russian culprits, but it’s also worth keep in mind that if it does turn out this was a third-party attack with the intent of goading the US and Russia to a military conflict, that’s exactly the kind of revelation that could end up being one of those fortuitous events that easing tensions. Obama’s planned “Russian Reset” that was snuffed out by the Snowden Affair may not be exactly repeatable at this point given the situation in Ukraine and annexation of Crimea, but that doesn’t mean a “reset” of sorts still can’t happen at the end of Obama’s last term. Few things are as sobering and likely to induce peaceful overtures than an exposed plot to pit two nuclear powers against each other.
It’s also worth keeping in that regardless of whether or not “Guccifer 2.0” is a state actor or someone else, there’s almost undoubtedly going to be a lot more random partisan hacks of this nature going forward. Especially if the YouGov poll highlighted by Wikileaks showing a surge in support for Wikileaks among Republicans, is accurate. If this tactic becomes popular and acceptable, hacking political groups is probably going to become a permanent political pastime. Especially if you can easily get away with framing the Russians or Chinese or any other foreign power with similar capabilities. Why wouldn’t it become widespread if that’s the case?
So get ready for a lot more Democratic hacks and leaks (along with some laughable GOP hacks and leaks). And also get ready for some cyberwars and maybe real proxy wars if that’s how this play out. But don’t get ready for any meaningful consideration of the possibility that we’re getting duped into those wars by one of the many groups out there capable of mimicking a conspicuous Russian attack. And don’t get ready for any meaningful speculation as to what other forces in the world with elite hacking skills (like the pro-Trump faction of Anonymous or Wikileaks) would love to see a ratcheting of tensions between the US and Russia. That’s clearly not going to happen. Clearly and conspicuously.
I’ve confronted Wiki leaks directly about Assange’s support for the far-right and how that’s glossed over by progressive (controlled) left media and I received a very confused almost MK ULTRA like non sense reply from them (Assange himself? ) on Twitter.
Could be an early “gene editing” experiment? Was this a function of the cult? Was this part of his symbolic/ritual importance to the larger stage.
Bill Maher asked Assange “Why don’t you hack into Donald Trump’s tax returns?” With an insipid disingenuous smile he replied ‘We’re working on it.”
BS!! Wikileaks later tweated “Wikileaks isn’t working on
hacking Trump’s tax returns. Claim is a joke from a comedy show.” The joke here is Assange himself. The Ecuadorian embassy should throw the bum out.
Mark Ames penned a great critique entitled “The Gary Johnson Swindle and the Degradation of Third Party Politics” in nsfwcorp Nov. 6 2012. In it we learned “The first interesting thing about Gary Johnson is that he decided to set up his campaign headquarters in Salt Lake City Utah, just a few blocks away from the HQ of the Church of Latter Day Saints. That’s where Gary Johnson’s main Super PAC is located as well. Gary Johnson isn’t Mormon.” I would add neither is Ron Paul. Ames continued “Johnson’s actual record as governor of New Mexico was that of a law and order authoritarian…stiffening prison sentences
(while recklessly privatizing the prisons), along with a broader program of slashing taxes, slashing social programs and privatizing schools. He was divisive and his law and order policies led to some of the worst prison violence in decades.” He contracted Wackenhut to run the prisons and that scuzzy outfit made campaign contributions. The story gets worse as Johnson’s campaign utilized the services of far right dirty tricks specialists Jim Lacy, Maureen Otis AND — you guessed it that old dirty swinging’ dandy himself — ROGER STONE! Since this article was published the ‘business minded” Johnson stepped down as CEO of Cannabis Sativa a marijuana company. Don’t know if he sold weed to welfare recipients only to have them submit to drug tests, then kick them off the dole and lock ’em up. Maybe Johnson, Assange, Paul and the aptly-named Stone can pass the bong around while chortling over how well the Friedman Chicago economic model worked in fellow traveller Pinochet’s Chile. Coming soon to an election near you.
@Dennis–
Citizen Greenwald is a big fan of Gary Johnson as well:
http://www.out.com/news-commentary/2011/04/18/glenn-greenwald-life-beyond-borders
Best,
Dave
The high-profile hack attacks of 2016 heated up again this week. So who was the latest victim? Well, believe it or not, the NSA:
“In a post written in broken English, the Shadow Brokers offered to sell a complete trove of tools to the highest bidder. The group said if it is paid one million bitcoin, valued at roughly $568 million, it will release the tools publicly.”
So, once again, we have a high profile hack targeting the US government, although in this case it’s not the DNC, which would presumably be a fairly easy target for elite hackers, but instead an organization that one assumes is the most unhackable in the world. If it’s a real hack, that’s pretty impressive.
At the same time, as with the DNC email hacks, this latest hack is both conspicuously high profile and appears to involve conspicuously atypical hacking behaviors. For instance, as the article below points out, the phenomena of hackers selling exploits they discover is quite commonplace. What isn’t commonplace is offering to sell the exploit to the entire world with an absurdly high price tag. Half a billion dollars for an alleged NSA toolkit trove that will be publicly released doesn’t exactly leave you with a huge market of potential buyers unless you’re trying to convince the bitcoin community to crowdsource the whole Bitcoin community, especially since the price of bitcoins would probably skyrocket if some nation or private entity suddenly decided to purchase a million bitcoins (the Bitcoin community probably wouldn’t mind if this happened). And if some government or private entity did try to acquire a million bitcoins, it would be awfully hard to buy those million bitcoins without someone discovering your identity. It’s one of the many reasons to assume that the offer to sell the toolkit to the highest bidder isn’t really about finding a buyer but instead about just getting publicity for the hack.
Another reason to assume the million bitcoin price is just a theatrics is the fact that Wikileaks announced they’re going to be releasing the entire alleged NSA toolkit. So the hackers asking for half a billion dollars also apparently decided to give their toolkit to Wikileaks so it could leak it to the world for free. That’s a bit odd.
Still, the notion that there’s a group out there hacking NSA servers should raise some eyebrows whether it’s the Russians like everyone is assuming (and the hackers clearly want us to assume) or some other group. So it’s worth noting that, as the article below points out, a number of researchers looking over the hack are raising the possibility that the server wasn’t hacked at all. Instead, it could have been a case of classic espionage. Someone with a USB stick. It’s also worth noting that Edward Snowden, someone who knows how easy it is to steal from the NSA with a USB stick, is declaring that Russia is likely behind it:
“If you ask ex-NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the public leak and claims of the Shadow Brokers seem to have Russian fingerprints all over them, and it serves as a warning from Moscow to Washington. The message: If your policymakers keep blaming us for the DNC hack, then we can use this hack to implicate you in much more.”
That’s Snowden’s take: this is all part of a Russian messaging/propaganda war. And who knows, maybe that’s that case and the explanation for the conspicuous hacking behavior that consistently seems to be trying to finger Russian government hackers as the culprits. It’s possible. But when you consider suspicions that this could have been an inside job, someone with a USB sticks it’s also worth keeping in mind that if there was someone associated with Russia’s intelligence community that would have been very well positioned to pull off such a spy operation, it’s Edward Snowden. Especially since the latest files released in the hack are from the same year Snowden fled to Russia:
“Snowden also noted that the released files end in 2013. “When I came forward, NSA would have migrated offensive operations to new servers as a precaution,” he suggested — a move that would have cut off the hackers’ access to the server.
“You’re welcome,” he tweeted.”
Well, that’s one possible explanation for why the hacked material is no newer than 2013: the hackers presumably lost access to their hacked server after the Snowden affair forced the NSA to move their offensive operations to different servers. But that explanation also assumes this server was actually remotely hacked, as opposed to a USB-stick classic spy operation.
And that raises a really big question that could potentially be answered although it’s unclear who could answer it: were these tools part of the giant Snowden “Doomsday” cache of technical documents? The documents that Glenn Greenwald threatened would be released if anything happened to Snowden and that Greenwald described as the NSA “blueprints”? There were apparently only three unknown people how had the keys to Snowden’s Doomsday cache, although the NSA itself presumably has a good idea of what Snowden took so it will be interesting to see if this latest leak is really an extension of the Snowden leak.
Thanks Eddy?
@Pterrafractyl–
This is not to blow my own horn, but my characterization of Eddie the Friendly Spook as “The Obverse Oswald” is looking more and more prescient.
These high-profile hacks designed, obviously, to finger Russia do NOT appear to be of Russian intel origin at all.
And with the Peach Fuzz Fascist (Snowden) weighing in that, sho ’nuff, this must be Russia, he is looking more and more like a culprit.
This is REALLY looking like the relatively clumsy “painting of Oswald Red.”
” . . . . On a website written in broken English, the Shadow Brokers revealed some files and promised “better” ones available, for sale to the highest bidder. One caveat: By “bidding,” they mean sending bitcoins, and losing bidders don’t get them back. (“Sorry lose bidding war lose bitcoin and files. Lose Lose. Bid to win!”) . . . ”
Sounds like Boris and Natasha, Dahlink!
Not too convincing.
Best,
Dave
@Dave: One of the things worth noting regarding the cui bono angle behind the NSA hack/theft is that, as the second article below makes clear, the emerging meme in response to the hack is that this is why the NSA should immediately disclose all exploits it finds for the purpose of greater security, which was one of the core arguments behind pushed by Snowden and the cypherpunk community in the wake of the Snowden affair. Of course, most of those warnings were predicated on assumption that random hacker would discover these same vulnerabilities independently (and not that the NSA would itself get hacked or hit with a Snowden-like inside job), but that’s been the argument. And this hack is certainly poised to push that meme that the NSA makes us all less secure, a meme that assumes there’s minimal value or security gained from what spy agencies spying on, say, other governments or criminal organizations.
Cui bono? The cypherpunks definitely did in this case. Whether or not society in general benefits sort of depends on how much abuse take place with that hacking code now that it’s released to the world and the lag time associated with developing and installing patches on all that hardware (and also whether or not there was actually some important surveillance taking place using those exploits that are going to be closed).
And since it’s widely assumed that Russia is behind the hack, it’s also worth noting that Cisco, one of the three brands of hardware targeted by the released toolkit, was actually charged with going around American sanctions against Russia to sell Russia’s military and the FSB its networking hardware (which is presumably now hackable) last year:
“Citing internal documents and inside sources, Buzzfeed says Cisco altered sales records and booked deals under false customer names on order to continue sales to Russian military and security forces. Cisco succeeded in selling equipment to Russia’s FSB – the successor to the KGB – by disguising them as sales to the Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry of the Russian Federation.”
So if we suddenly get reports that Russia has recently purged or independently patched its military and intelligence IT infrastructure, or that those Cisco routers were never actually used, that would certainly suggest Russia knew this release, which is going to impact critical systems around the globe, was coming soon. But so far it doesn’t look like the Russian government was super concerned about Cisco vulnerabilities last year.
Here’s something else to keep an eye on regarding when the hack actually took place and the possibility that this stolen code could have been part of the larger Snowden Doomsday file: Based on the time stamps of the files currently made available, it would appear that the hack/theft took place after the Snowden affair because the “FileModifyDate” value of publicly available files are are mostly on June 11, 2013, with one as late as October 18th, 2013:
“Experts studying the release say the material probably was stolen in October 2013, the date of the last file creation. If that’s true, then someone or another spy agency has had time to hack companies using the vulnerable firewalls or watch NSA’s own cyber spying.”
Well, that settles it. The hack/theft must have happend post-Snowden. Except, of course, for the fact that there was absolutely nothing preventing the “Shadow Brokers” from modifying those timestamps. Sure, it’s very possible that the timestamps on the publicly available uploaded files are indeed accurate and a reasonable measure of when this hack took place. But since it’s also very possible that those timestamps have been modified because there’s absolutely nothing preventing that and it would be an untraceable modification, it seems like we should be reading something like “Experts studying the release say the material probably was stolen in October 2013, the date of the last file creation, assuming the files have not been modified in any way which is a silly assumption at this point in time.” It’s kind of like basing an investigation solely on asking the suspect questions and just assuming everything they say is true.
Again, it’s not like it’s impossible that these timestamps are accurate. But if that’s the only evidence, that’s not really evidence. Or at least it’s barely evidence. So it will be interesting to see if any additional evidence of the actual date of this hack/theft emerges after WikiLeaks released its “pristine” set of the full archives of super NSA hacking tools. It’s “pristine” archive which, of course, could be totally modified without anyone else knowing it.
James Bamford weighed in on the release of the NSA’s “Tailored Access Operations” (TAO) super hacking tools by the allegedly Russian “Shadow Brokers”. Bamford’s conclusion? It was most likely another Snowden-like inside job, but Bamford doesn’t think the source of this leak was Snowden or someone with access to the full Snowden cache. Bamford actually traveled to Russia, interviewed Snowden, and got to examine and search what Snowden claimed was the full cache and didn’t see anything indicating TAO hacking tools (although who knows if what he saw was the full “dead-man’s switch” Doomsday cache).
No, the person Bamford has in mind in none other than Jacob Appelbaum, the Berlin-based hackivist/Tor developer (ex-Tor developer)/Wikileaks hacker/avowed enemy of Hillary Clinton. Why Appelbaum? Well, because when Jacob Appelbaum gave his big speech in December 2013 at the Chaos Communications Congress and wrote a bunch of Der Spiegel articles describing an array of of NSA TAO hacking tools, everyone assumed he was grabbing that info from the Snowden cache. But Bamford never saw those tools when he examined the cache and there was never an explanation of where Appelbaum got that TAO data.
So are Appelbaum, or possibly Appelbaum’s unidentified NSA inside source, the real “Shadow Brokers”? That’s what Bamford appears to suspect:
“But going through this archive using a sophisticated digital search tool, I could not find a single reference to the ANT catalog. This confirmed for me that it had likely been released by a second leaker. And if that person could have downloaded and removed the catalog of hacking tools, it’s also likely he or she could have also downloaded and removed the digital tools now being leaked.”
That was Bamford’s impression after scouring Snowden’s cache in Russia: The ANT catalog of TAO hacking tools discussed by Jacob Appelbaum in 2013 must have come from a second Snowden leaker. And regardless of whether or not that theory is true or not, it’s hard to ignore the fact that the TAO tools Appelbaum publicly disclosed in 2013 are exactly the kind of tools the Shadow Brokers released. It’s also hard to ignore the fact that Appelbaum really, really hates Hillary Clinton:
“Shortly thereafter, he turned his attention to Hillary Clinton. At a screening of a documentary about Assange in Cannes, France, Appelbaum accused her of having a grudge against him and Assange, and that if she were elected president, she would make their lives difficult. “It’s a situation that will possibly get worse” if she is elected to the White House, he said, according to Yahoo News.”
Well, there’s certainly no shortage of circumstantial evidence pointing in the direction of Appelbaum. And while the following is rather weak additional evidence, since Appelbaum is currently living in Berlin it’s worth noting that the email address that appears to be used by the Shadow Brokers is a German email provider with a policy of cooperating with legal authorities as little as possible and only handing over encrypted data when given a court order:
“He said Tutanota had only ever been forced to hand over encrypted data of its users a few times and it has a transparency report where it discloses those cases. “However, we release data only in very, very few cases … And when we have to provide the data due to a court order, it is still encrypted,” Pfau added, going on to explain the company’s stance on surveillance.”
Well, it will be interesting to see if there are any followup reports on German authorities asking for the encrypted account data. If they don’t that would be rather odd.
Still, keep in mind that there’s nothing stopping someone from anywhere with an internet connection from using a Tutanota account, although Germany’s enhanced data-privacy laws for citizens would potentially make a German-based hacker more likely to stick with a domestic super-privacy email service. But the Tutanota data point is, at this point, really just an interesting side point that at least kind of hints at a Germany-based hacker.
So is Jacob Appelbaum, or perhaps Appelbaum’s unidentified NSA source, the real Shadow Broker? Perhaps, but let’s not throw out the possibility that the leaked NSA hacking tools really were part of the Snowden doomsday cache (a cache that Bamford presumably never had full access to). Let’s especially not throw that possibility out since Edward Snowden sent out a cryptic tweet one week before the leak that could very easily be interpreted as a metaphorical push of the Dead Man’s Switch
“Gellman, who is currently writing a book about the Edward Snowden leaks, was previously embroiled in another recent post that sparked controversy after the former NSA contractor mysteriously tweeted: “It’s time.”
Let’s see...so Snowden first cryptically tweets on August 3, “Did you work with me? Have we talked since 2013? Please recontact me securely, or talk to @bartongellman. It’s time. https://t.co/AKmgF5AIDJ”
And then he tweets a very long cryptographic key of some sort. Then he goes silent for a couple days and people start assuming he’s dead. And then a week later we get the Shadow Broker leak of NSA TAO hacking tools.
So we have circumstantial evidence suggesting that the Shadow Brokers leak may be a consequence of Snowden hitting his switch along with circumstantial evidence that Appelbaum already had his hands on the kinds of NSA hacking tools that actually got leaked but those tools probably didn’t come from Snowden but a different, still unidentified, NSA leaker. Curiouser and curiouser...
@Pterrafractyl–
Applebaum? WikiLeaks? All part of what I have termed “Team Snowden” and that I fingered as the culprit for the high-profile leaks.
Another of the “Conga-Line ‘Ops”” here, I suspect.
Recall that Applebaum appears to have assisted Snowden’s flight from Hawaii to China. WikiLeaks and Sarah Harrison helped “The Obverse Oswald” get to Moscow.
Although Snowden may not have been personally involved (and, who knows, he MAY have been), “Team Snowden” is coming into higher profile here all the time.
The fact that Snowden weighed in that “Sho ‘Nuff, must be Russia” is approaching the territory of what legal analysts call “consciousness of guilt.”
Don’t expect the world’s journalistic community to start fingering The Peachfuzz Fascist, however.
They have already cast him as a saint and can’t do otherwise without making themselves look like clowns.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Dave
It’s been reported that the disgraced former head of Fox News, Roger Ailes, is prepping Donald Trump for the presidential debates with Hillary Clinton.
Ailes, of course, was shown the gate for sexual misconduct. Applebaum, who championed Assange in the face of rape allegations in 2012, was himself cut loose by the Tor Project after an internal investigation determined sexual harrassment allegations against Applebaum were true. Perhaps Applebaum and Assange can assist Ailes in getting Trump ready. The Three A ….. (No not Amigos). A federal lawsuit filed by “Jane Doe” in June of this year accused Trump of raping her in 1994 when she was thirteen years old. Interesting how MSM AND Progressives have let this quartet skate away unlike Bill Cosby (and I’m no apologist for Cosby!).
The abysmal sexual politics of Julian Assange continued today with Wikileaks’ unredacted mass data dump outing gay people in Saudi Arabia, one of the most repressive countries in the world when it comes to LGBT civil rights.
Roger Stone recently gave another interview where he repeated his claim that he’s in contact with Julian Assange and hinted at the likely nature of a possible Wikileaks “October Surprise”, although he noted that it might happen sooner than October and Assange might just do strategic dumps before the three presidential debates. So get ready for a September surprise since the first scheduled debate is September 26. Plus a couple October surprises for the other two debates. And presumably another surprise before the actual election.
Stone also briefly mentioned one topic that is likely going to be in at least one of those leaks: “I believe that he is in possession of all of those emails that Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, the Clinton aides, believe they deleted. That and a lot more. These are like the Watergate tapes.” Keep in mind that the right-wing has long tried to smear Huma Abedin with Muslim Brotherhood ties and Roger Stone recently suggested she’s a terrorist agent. So while there’s probably going to be multiple “surprises” over the next couple of months, at least one of them is going to try to suggest that Hillary is a terrorist agent:
““I don’t know that this is going to happen in October...There is an enormous amount of material here. Mr. Assange could, theoretically, drop a tranche of documents before each one of [the presidential] debates.”
Get ready for special debate-influence-leaks, served up just for The Donald’s debate nights. Because Julian Assange cares about the future.
Or course, there’s no guarantee that whatever Wikileaks leaks right before the debate will end up getting much or any attention during the debate. That’s going to depend in part on how mundane the actual leaked info actual is and how hysterical the right-wing spin around it ends up being. Or course, if Donald Trump gets to pick the debate moderators as one of his “demands” for participating in the debates at all, there’s probably going to be quite a few questions about the Wikileaks “surprises”:
“I did very well in the debates on the primaries...According to the polls, I won all of them. So I look forward to the debates. But, yeah, I want to have fair moderators … I will demand fair moderators.”
Yep, Trump is totally willing to do the debates...as long as his demands are met and those demands include moderators Trump deems “fair”. At least that’s his bargaining position. We’ll see if it works. But given the media’s desire to see this race as close as possible right up until the last moment and given the ratings a Trump/Clinton debate could garner, it’s not at all inconceivable that we could see the Trump campaign basically stack the debate with far-right Breitbart-style moderators.
So, assuming Trump actually does the debates and doesn’t find a way to skip them and declared them rigged, get ready for an upcoming set of debates with lots of questions about how Hillary is secretly trying to undermine the US and supports terrorism. Lot’s of ironic questions asked non-ironically.
Julian Assange just gave a two-part interview with Megyn Kelly on Fox News. It didn’t contain too many surprises since it was mostly just Assange reiterating his foreshadowing of some sort of “October Surprise” against Hillary Clinton that will potentially shake up the election. Kelly asked Assange about his previous non-suggestion suggestion that Seth Rich, the recently murdered DNC staffer, was the source for his DNC email leaks and, also not surprisingly, Assange issued another non-denial denial intertwined with some more non-suggestion suggestions that Seth Rich was the source:
“When Kelly asked him if he has any suspicions on who may have murdered Rich, Assange responded, “We have received a variety of information. We will be forwarding that information to the police. I don’t think the information so far is enough to start pointing a direct finger. We don’t want to compromise the police investigation.””
So is this the big news that Assange feels will shake up the campaign? Some sort of evidence that Seth Rich was behind the DNC hack and vaguely points a finger towards some sort of Hillary hit man? If so, those police investigators would probably appreciate if Wikileaks actually forwarded that information to them. Note that Assange said he “will be forwarding that information to the police” as opposed to “we already forwarded that information to the police.” But then he raises questions about the utility of the information he’s received and says Wikileaks doesn’t want to compromise the police investigation. So maybe the police should be glad Wikileaks hasn’t forwarded the information yet because based any information that harms an investigation is probably disinformation. And yet here was have Assange once again pushing this meme.
Also keep in mind that if Rich really was behind the DNC hack it’s not inconceivable that Wikileaks would have evidence of this if Rich was in contact with Wikileaks, but the sources should in theory remain anonymous even to Wikileaks given the way Wikileaks’s online submission system works. So unless the DNC hack source specifically deanonymized themselves to Wikileaks (or Assange himself was behind the hack), the default assumption for Wikileaks’s knowledge of its sources is generally that it has no idea who the source actually is, which makes it all the more amazing that Assange just decided to publicly speculate and strongly hint that Rich was the source.
Unless, of course, he does have information that Rich was the source. Maybe Rich chatted with him using some encryption app or something. But if that’s the case, then it begs the question of whether or not Assange has passed that information along to police too. If not, why not?
It all raises the general question as to whether or not Wikileaks would, in theory, hand over information to investigators about their sources if 1. They know who the source is, and 2. The source just got mysteriously murdered and investigators have no suspect or motive. After all, if Wikileaks made it clear that it won’t reveal sources unless they’re mysteriously murdered and there are no suspects or motives, it’s hard to see how that would be anything other than an additional level of protection for Wikileaks’s sources.
So let’s hope some of these questions get asked of the man who repeatedly issues non-denial denials over whether or not his non-assertion assertions are intended to tell the world that Hillary Clinton has Seth Rich murdered during future interviews. Don’t be super surprised if they aren’t.
Oh, look at that: someone appears to have attempted to hack Illinois’s and Arizona’s voting systems:
“Federal and state election officials say that the prospect of a full-blown cyberattack that seriously disrupts the November elections is remote, but not out of the question. About 40 states use optical-scan electronic-voting machines, allowing voters to fill out their choices on paper. The results are tabulated by computers.”
Ok, let’s hope the prospect of a full-blown cyberattack that seriously disrupt the election really is remote. Hopefully that means Arizona’s and Illinois’s systems had just unusually crappy security or something. But as Josh Marshall reminds us below, if the purpose of a hack attack isn’t intended to secretly shift the outcome of an election but instead to simply disrupt the election, and call into question the integrity of the vote, than seriously disrupting the election could be as simple as raising major questions about the integrity of the vote in a few key precincts in a couple swing states in a manner that is guaranteed to be caught. In other words, it’s not that the hack will used to swing the election. It will be used to invalidate it in the minds of a hyperpolarized electorate:
“But here’s the thing. If foreign hackers of any source or domestic hackers for that matter want to disrupt an election, that’s much simpler. Perhaps you’ve hacked into the servers in advance and then you simply erase the data late in the day? Or shift it to all Clinton or all Trump. If it’s being done from somewhere in Senegal or Bangkok you’re never going to track down and apprehend the culprits. And the changes to the numbers don’t need to be credible to severely disrupt the election. Complete hypothetical: what if 10 critical precinct tallies in Florida and Ohio are simply erased or tampered with so that the numbers bear no confidence? What do you do then? We’re not in a high trust climate in our politics where something like that could be easily resolved. Precisely because we are already in such a low trust political era, even a tiny number of demonstrated cases of cyber-tampering would cast a penumbra of doubt over the whole process, especially for the losing party.”
Now, it’s worth noting that 2004 gives us a great example of what might happen if, say, Ohio has a number of voting irregularities, including possible electronic voting machine irregularities, in a very close race that would have determined the outcome of the presidential election. And in that case, questions were indeed raised and continued to be raised years later as evidence for electronic voter fraud mounted using a pro-Bush voting tabulation company continued to accrue (and the GOP’s IT guru died in a small plane crash after getting subpoenaed in an investigation over the election), but it’s not like the results of the whole election results were called into question and a constitutional crisis ensued.
So we do have one fairly recent example of how the US might respond if there’s significant questions raised about integrity of the vote, although in the case of the 2004 Ohio vote the types of GOP violations went far beyond just possible electronic vote-rigging so it possible that a full-spectrum vote-manipulation/suppression campaign could have the effect of almost masking the shock and mystery associated with the unexplained pro-GOP vote shifts.
It’s also important to keep in mind that it was John Kerry, a Democrat, who lost in 2004, and Kerry wasn’t exactly a “burn it all down!” kind of politician. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has already declared that the only way he can lose is if the election is rigged. It was one of the themes of his very first general election tv ad. And Roger Stone has already declared the government no longer the government if Trump loses and there’s going to be widespread civil-disobedience and a ‘bloodbath’.
So the Trump campaign clearly wants someone to hack the vote somewhere. Or, more generally, hack voting system computers and get caught. And don’t forget that for the Trump campaign to raise hell and demand the entire election invalid it wouldn’t necessarily even have to be a hack that manipulates a single vote. Just a single hack like what was reported, where it’s clear the someone got into the system, would potentially be adequate if Trump simply wanted to create narrative about how the whole system was rigged. And, lo and behold, we now have two separate states that experienced some sort of successful hacking on their voting systems. That’s convenient. For the people that want to burn it all down.
There is one problem with all this for Trump: the fact that the hackers are either trying to spoof Russian hackers or are actually Russian hackers. If there are news reports about Russian hackers on election night that wouldn’t go so well for Trump’s narrative. But that’s also part of why it’s so potentially dangerous to attribute the source of all these hacks, whether or they’re DNC email hacks or whatever, to the Russian government when the hackers are obviously trying to make it look like they’re from Russia. Sure, they could be Russian hackers trying to send a signal. But since we really have no idea and we’re talking about elite hackers who would presumably have the ability to spoof Russian hackers, there’s nothing stopping them from pretending to be a completely different set of hackers on election day, whether they’re Russian hackers or not.
So we have another round of hackers, hackers who seem to want to be seen as Russian hackers and might be but we really don’t know, now hacking state election systems and getting caught. And we know that getting caught hacking is potentially the big trigger that can help Trump the most. So if the plan is to get caught hacking on election day, one of the big questions we should be asking is whether or not these same hackers, or similar groups, are going to continue doing that in a way that seems to blatantly seem like Russian hackers did it? Because that wouldn’t really help the Trump narrative.
In other words, the more evidence we have that there are pro-Trump hackers out there planning on assisting the Trump campaign in whatever manner they can, and the more those pro-Trump hackers keep getting caught in a manner that makes the seem like they want to be caught identified as Russian hackers, the more important it becomes to ask the question of whether or not these hackers are intentionally leaving tracks that identify them Russian hackers or not. Because if these are elite hackers at work, who presumably have the ability and apparent desire to self-implicate themselves as Russian hackers, why wouldn’t they do the same thing on election day but choose a completely different pro-Clinton identity? That’s what Trump and the far-right in general, who would love to destabilize the US democratic system, are pining for. So why wouldn’t the hackers pretend to be pro-Hillary hackers on election day and flip a few precincts in a state like Illinois her way? Isn’t it basically setting a giant trap for ourselves to assume that these hackers really are Russian and can’t help but get caught and identified as Russian?
Goebbels would be so proud of this propaganda! I wonder if the propaganda leads the DNC to believe the hacks were caused by Russia, but right before the election they will prove the hack came from someone other than the Russians. This will discredit Hillary. Hillary so far has taken the bait. See the article below:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/wikileaks-founder-julian-assange-slams-8714291
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange slams Hillary Clinton’s ‘McCarthyite-style anti-Russian hysteria’ and accuses her of ‘demonising’ Donald Trump campaign
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has accused Hillary Clinton of being “hysterical” about Russia with a “kind of neo-McCarthyist” politics.
Speaking to Fox News via video-link from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, Assange said: “She has palled up with the neo-cons responsible for the Iraq war and she has grabbed onto a kind of neo-McCarthy hysteria about Russia and is using this to demonise the Trump campaign.”
The Democratic presidential candidate accused Donald Trump at her latest rally in Reno, Nevada yesterday of having links to Vladimir Putin.
She referred to the Russian leader as the “grand godfather of this global brand of extreme nationalism” and said “Trump himself heaps praise on Putin and embraces pro-Russian policies”.
Assange has not officially endorsed the trump campaign but said it has no links to Russian agents.
Wikileaks made around 20,000 Democratic National Committee email public last month, which appeared to reveals that top politicians attempted to derail the Bernie Sanders’ nomination.
Clinton alleged that Russia was behind the DNC hack but hasn’t provided evidence to back up her claims.
Assage has been holed-up in the embassy for four years, under constant police surveillance, after being granted asylum after Sweden called for him to be extradited over historic sexual assault claims.
He is wanted for questioning over allegations against two women in 2010 — which he has always denied.
However, he claims if he travels to Sweden the American government will secure his extradition over espionage charges related to his work for Wikileaks.
In February, a UN panel ruled that Assange has been “arbitrarily detained” in the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
Earlier this month he offered to be questioned inside the embassy but the Swedish prosecutors only recently agreed.
One of the ironic quirks about the “October surprise” in American politics is that it’s not really a surprise. At least not in terms of the timing since October is basically the month you would expect a big nasty planned ‘surprise’ to get used during a presidential election season that ends in early November. If you’re going to dump something big on your opponent it’s basically got to be an October, or maybe November, surprise.
And this year it’s even less surprising if we get an October surprise since Julian Assange and Roger Stone have been hinting about it for months. That said, if we do get our long-predicted October surprise this week it will actually be a little surprising, if only because Assange and Stone keep sending mixed messages when exactly we’re supposed to all get surprised by their big planned October surprise:
“On Sunday, NBC’s Rodriguez reported that Assange will still make a public appearance on Tuesday in a video livestream at a Berlin press conference. It’s unclear if that appearance is related to the purported “October surprise.” ”
Ok, so after Assange canceled his planned balcony announcement for Tuesday, citing security concerns. Then Roger Stone tweets that the Hillary Clinton will be “done” by Wednesday because of Wikileaks, and then we get a report that Assange will actually make a video appears at a Berlin press conference on Tuesday, although it’s unclear if he’ll be talking about the October surprise. So you can at least be a little surprised if we do see some big October surprise as previously scheduled on Tuesday.
There is, however, a genuine surprise that we can already identify from the whole back and forth between Assange and Stone: Roger Stone has “a very good friend”. Really, he does. At least that what he claims. You might suspect someone like Stone wouldn’t actually have very good friends, but he apparently does have at least one. Who that very good friend is remains a mystery but that very good friend is a apparently Stone’s contact with Assange and flew to London last week to meet with Assange:
“A very good friend of mine is on his way to London even as we speak to talk to him. I will get a report shortly...”
Yes, Roger Stone has a very good friend. Now you know. In October. Surprise!
So that was Stone’s message last Thursday, one day before Assange initially canceled his Tuesday balcony appearance. And just yesterday we got a new update from Roger Stone about his friend’s meeting with Assange: Yes, the October surprise is coming, it’s going to be devastating. Also, Hillary is trying to figure out to how kill Assange. This all according to Roger and his mysterious friend (who is also a friend of Assange):
“Now we’ve seen disinformation in the last 24 hours saying that Assange has postponed this, he’s moved. I do know this. He does fear for his life and he should. Right now the globalists and the Clintonites are trying to figure out how to kill him.”
Yes, Roger is convinced that the Clintons are getting ready to assassinate Assange. Is this something his mystery friend told him? No, unfortunately it comes from a far less credible source. And while you might think it’s not actually possible to find a less credible source than an anonymous mystery friend of Roger Stone, you must not be familiar with True Pundit:
“Conspiracy theorist Paul Joseph Watson of Alex Jones’ Infowars initially described the True Pundit story as “iffy,” but after Wikileaks posted it said, “thought this was a fake story, until Wikileaks tweeted it out.””
Bwah!! That’s right, even Infowars thought that the story looked “iffy”. At least until Wikileaks tweeted it out. Surprise! Oh wait, that’s not at all a surprise. Oh well. We’ll just have to wait and see if Assange gets taken out by a drone strike. That would actually be pretty surprising.
And the Year of the Troll rolls on. Look who Wikileaks trolled today during Julian Assange’s big hyped press conference where he was expected to reveal his big devastating October surprise about Hillary Clinton: Alex Jones and Roger Stone (and anyone else waiting with bated breath for the big surprise):
“Turns out, probably not much. There was no spectacular release of private emails. No bombshells about the Clinton Foundation or brain tumors. Instead, Assange and some of his WikiLeaks colleagues used the press conference to make a pitch for donations and to note the remarkable quantity of the site’s work—10 million documents published, containing more than 10 billion words, which the group claims is “more secret documents than the rest of the world’s media combined.””
So it sounds like the big surprise is that Wikileaks needs donations and has a lot of documents. That was the big reveal. Surprise!
And now we get to scratch our heads wondering if Assange had nothing all along, or if what he was given was such garbage that just couldn’t go through with it and decided to turn the press conference into a fund-raising pitch at the last minute. This would be a time when a Wikileak internal leak might come in handy. Any Wikileaks insiders want to enlighten us?
Although, since Assange also promised a new leak a week for the next 10 weeks, it should be apparent soon enough if he has something worth leaking. Or maybe he’s just hoping that he can get a bunch of new documents soon and the ’10 weeks of leaks’ pledge was just an attempt to buy time. Of and course there’s another reason Assange might need to buy time: To do a better job creating fake leaks and avoid the laughable fate of “Guccfier 2.0”’s surprise leak today. That’s right, Guccifer 2.0, the hacker (or hackers) who are attributed with pulling off the big DNC hack, released a big Clinton Foundation hack today. A hack that, upon casual inspection, turned out to be an obviously doctored release based on the earlier DNC hack. So “Guccifer 2.0” just demonstrated that they are more than happy to fabricate the documents they’re leaking while attempting to smear the Clinton Foundation. It’s today’s bonus October troll surprise:
“If anything, many of the DCCC documents revealed in this “Clinton Foundation” dump are more damaging to Republicans than they are to Democrats.”
Oops. So was “Guccifer 2.0”’s big Clinton Foundation hoax leak the leak that Assange was supposed to release today but didn’t because it was such an obvious hoax? Again, a insider Wikileaks leak sure would be helpful here. After today’s multiple surprises there’s clearly a Wikileaks transparency problem.
With the presidential race turning out to be closer than expected in a number of key battleground states, it’s probably worth noting that this is exactly the kind of scenario Roger Stone’s unscientific ‘scientific exit polling’ scheme was designed to wreak havoc. And while, as the article below notes, Stone has been forced to modify the instructions for his “Stop the Steal” group that was to be carrying out these “exit polls” following a string of Democratic lawsuits, the unscientific ‘scientific exit polls’ are still part of Stone’s plans:
“Stone said the goal of organizing volunteers to conduct exit polls in key areas was to check if the official results of any precinct differed from the group’s poll by more than 2%. While slightly more than 2% might not be a concern, he said a 10% deviation would suggest to him that the voting machines had been “tampered with”. He conceded there might be some margin of error in the volunteer-run exit poll project.”
Yes, if Roger Stone’s unscientific ‘scientific exit polling’ goon squad finds more than a 10 percent difference between their exit polls and the results, they’re going to cry foul. Granted, he’ll primarily be crying foul in Infowars, so the potential impact “Stop the Steal” will have even if they do cry foul is unclear. Unclear in a bad way.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016–10-27/twitter-s-firehose-of-tweets-is-incredibly-valuable-and-just-as-dangerous
But if Twitter provides a rare outlet for criticism of repressive regimes, it’s also useful to those regimes for tracking down and punishing critics. In September 2012 a Saudi Twitter user named Bader Thawab was arrested for tweeting “down with the House of Saud.” In March 2014 an eight-year prison sentence was upheld for a Saudi man who’d mocked the king and religious officials on Twitter and YouTube. The following May, a Saudi man in a wheelchair named Dolan bin Bakheet was sentenced to 18 months in prison and 100 lashes for using Twitter to complain about his medical care. In all, there have been dozens of Twitter-related prosecutions in Saudi Arabia, according to Human Rights Watch.
Twitter is still popular in the kingdom—the service has added 200,000 active users there since 2014, according to the Arab Social Media Report—but it no longer hosts much dissent. Activists are careful to tweet in coded language, if they tweet at all. “People don’t openly discuss important things on Twitter anymore,” says Ali Adubisi, a Saudi human-rights activist. “Twitter is totally different, totally silent, totally weak.”
Critiques about the dark side of Twitter have been around almost since its founding in 2006. Women and minorities have long complained of routine harassment from trolls, leaving them with little recourse beyond deleting their accounts. The tendency of Twitter conversations to end in vitriol or even physical threats has hindered the company’s efforts to attract new users—its user base grew just 1 percent in the second quarter of 2016—and to reach profitability. The prevalence of abuse on the platform also figured in the decision by Walt Disney, a leading candidate to buy the company, to back away in October from a bid, according to people familiar with Disney’s thinking. Twitter’s stock price has fallen 31 percent since reaching a high for the year on Oct. 5. It’s preparing to lay off 300 employees, or about 8 percent of its workforce, according to Bloomberg News.
During an earnings call in July, Dorsey acknowledged that Twitter needed to think harder about how it ensures the safety of its users. “Freedom of expression means little if we allow voices to be silenced because of fear of harassment,” Dorsey said, adding that user safety would be “one of our top five priorities for this year.”
“We all knew this could be used to put a black bag over someone’s head and make them disappear”
For years, Twitter has offered access to its “Firehose”—the global deluge of tweets, half a billion a day—to a number of companies that monitor social media. Some of those companies resell the information—mostly to marketers, but also to governments and law enforcement agencies around the world. Some of these authorities use the data to track dissidents, as Bloomberg Businessweek has learned through dozens of interviews with industry insiders and more than 100 requests for public records from law enforcement agencies in the U.S.
There’s nothing illegal about selling Twitter data, but it’s uncomfortable for a company that promotes itself as a medium for free speech and protest. Twitter issues regular transparency reports and has gone to court to fight censorship. Dorsey himself marched with Black Lives Matter activists in 2014, regularly tweeting messages of support and appearing at a conference this June wearing a #staywoke T‑shirt. But amid Dorsey’s activism, one data user, Chicago monitoring company Geofeedia, was hired by California police departments after pitching its ability to identify civil rights protesters, according to an American Civil Liberties Union report released in September. Twitter, which touts a policy that prohibits third parties from making content available “to investigate, track or surveil Twitter’s users or their content,” cut ties with Geofeedia in October.
Twitter offers a free, stripped-down version of the full Firehose to the public, and in recent years, at least 17 companies besides Geofeedia have marketed surveillance products that make use of Twitter data to law enforcement organizations. One such company, Snaptrends, based in Austin, promoted social media analytics tools to authorities in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and other countries known to suppress online speech, according to confidential company documents and interviews with current and former employees. The company often approached potential customers during moments of social unrest. In a statement, Snaptrends characterizes its business with foreign governments as appropriate and lawful, and says its software was intended for “market awareness around a brand, product, service, issue, or a person.”
According to internal documents, Snaptrends has done business with the United Arab Emirates, whose government last year imprisoned an Omani blogger for tweets insulting the U.A.E.’s leaders. It also provided Twitter data to a law enforcement agency in Bangladesh that’s classified as a “death squad” by Human Rights Watch. As Kevin Hatline, a former customer support manager at Snaptrends, puts it, “We all knew this could be used to put a black bag over someone’s head and make them disappear.”
Isn’t that special, the GOP’s 2012 “autopsy” got replaced with a national 2016 terminal illness diagnosis. So now that the GOP has complete control of all the federal levers of power and watching the GOP kill the future is set to become America’s new pastime, it’s worth noting that there’s fun new way active game you can play too: Finding something you can do that lands you on Trump’s enemies list:
“If [Graham] felt his interests was with that candidate, God bless him,” Manigault remarked. “I would never judge anybody for exercising their right to and the freedom to choose who they want. But let me just tell you, Mr. Trump has a long memory and we’re keeping a list.”
They’re already keeping a list! And there’s a spot on that list for all patriotic Americans. They just have to figure out how to get there and at least allow this nation to die with a little grace and dignity.
What’s going to be extra interesting is seeing just how many GOPers not already on that list end up on that list before his term is over. Why? Because with the GOP just one “accident” or major Trump-specific scandal away from seeing President Mike Pence — the GOP/Koch Brothers’ unabashed dream President — it’s not clear how long the intra-GOP honeymoon period will last. Especially if Trump behaves like...well Trump, and ends up trashing the GOP brand even more than it’s already been trashed. Don’t forget that part of Trump’s appeal to the GOP is that he wasn’t seen as a normal GOPer but something new. So now that the GOP basically “owns” the future by controlling all levers of power — along with all the blame the public will apply to the GOP after Trump/GOP policies inevitably destroys lives — we probably shouldn’t be too surprised if factions within the GOP start plotting for a Trumpexit of one form or another if Trump ends up governing like the unhinged lunatic he appears to actually be in real life and ends up the kind of national embarassment that makes George W. Bush look like a statesman. In other words, while Trump’s enemies list will probably be mostly comprised of his political enemies on the Left, there’s going to be no shortage of scenarios that could end up with quite a few GOP Trump enemies too. More precisely, the more unhinged and disastrous Trump’s president is, the longer that GOP enemies list is probably going to get. Especially if the nation sours on Trump before the 2018 mid-term elections and GOPers start feeling the need to distance themselves from Trump. That’s clearly not going to go over well with the Trumpster!
But also note that Trump represents basically an neo-Nazi fascist takeover of the White House and is seen as a vehicle by open Nazis in the Alt-Right to mainstream and legitimize their grip on real political power. And that means any elected Republicans who don’t make it very clear that they are fully supportive of a white nationalist fascist takeover of the nation are probably going to be preemptively put on that list, whether they overtly oppose Trump or not. There’s a purge coming, folks! And if the GOP doesn’t allow Donald Trump to completely remake the party in the Alt-Right image — whether this looks like it’s going to help or hurt the party in the long run — the GOP is going to be ground zero for that purge. Oddly enough, Trump’s era of neo-McCarthyism could start with the GOP. So, with all that in mind, here’s a taste of what’s going to happen to the people put on Trump’s enemies list. It should be a familiar taste at this point:
“The document, identified as a fake by the Clinton campaign, claims poll ratings had plunged for Clinton and called for “severe strategy changes for November” that could include “staged civil unrest” and “radiological attack” with dirty bombs to disrupt the vote.”
And that, right there, is probably going to be almost typical by the end of Trump’s term: faked documents, maybe pushed by Wikileaks or maybe just spread around by Roger Stone-types on the internet. When you consider that leaked documents about his enemies was the greatest ally of the Trump campaign, a campaign that is basically the manifestation of ‘the Big Lie’ succeeding in democratic politics, it’s pretty clear that the kinds of dirty tricks depicted above are going to be the New Normal. So it should be interesting to see what the inevitable documents about Lindsey Graham will say. They won’t even have to be fake documents claiming Lindsey is planning a dirty-bomb attack. They could just be real hacked documents that get farcically promoted as evidence that Linsday Graham is, say, a Satanist who kidnaps children. You know, kind of like the video from a neo-Nazi twitter account Donald Trump Jr. promoted days before the election:
“Mike Cernovich later said: “If you’re going to have children, you don’t want to live in a world where these people could potentially kidnap your children, make them disappear, sell them into all kinds of things, or who knows what. And that’s what people are realizing now is the gatekeepers are gone. The media people, they’re not writing about this because they’re right there at these parties — with them.””
Is Lindsey Graham going to end up getting exposed as a secret child-killing Satanist or secretly plotting a dirty-bomb attack? We’ll find out! And when we do, we can be confident that Donald Trump Jr. will be there to tweet about it. It’s all a reminder that it won’t just be Trump’s enemies list. It’s going to be the Alt-Right’s enemies list too, which the Trump administration will be more than happy to promote. Isn’t the age of the neo-Nazi enemies-list going to be fun?
Of course, maybe Trump’s enemies are hoping that there’s no way anyone could possibly believe such absurdities about them because such claims won’t remotely reflect their real track-record. Maybe that’s what they’ll assume. If so, LOL!
“The key, however, is Trump’s one true talent for branding. That’s how he dispatched the likes of “Little Marco” and “Lyin’ Ted” in the primary, before relentlessly hammering “Crooked Hillary” as a liar on the stump (“She lies more than any human being,” he said two weeks ago) and in advertising. It’s further proof of the well-documented fact that simply repeating falsehoods can make people belief they’re true.”
So that’s all part of what we can expect from the era of the Trump/Alt-Right enemies list, a list that will no doubt include nearly all progressive but also anyone that isn’t basically on board with an Alt-Right neo-Nazi future for America. So remember, if you aren’t doing the kinds of things that will get you labeled a child-killing Satanist planning on a dirty bomb attack, you probably aren’t actually trying to do the right thing in our Trumpian era.
Since we’re now in a Trumpian era of “enemies lists” and a far-right power alignment that will create an irresistible potential for basically jailing the political opponents of Trump’s agenda, it’s probably worth noting that the Trump campaign is still dropping hints that its going to prosecute Hillary Clinton:
“Trump rallies have sometimes been marked with chants of “lock her up,” and his supporters repeated those cries as the Republican moved toward an upset victory Tuesday night. Kellyanne Conway, his campaign manager, did not rule out appointing a special prosecutor in TV appearances Wednesday morning.”
“Hmmmm...maybe we’ll prosecute Hillary...we haven’t decided yet.” That was basically the message coming from Trump’s campaign manager on election night. And today Rudy Giuliani, someone on the short list to be Attorney General, gave us an update on the Trump administration’s stance: Rudy thinks it’s a “tough decision” and still isn’t sure what Trump should do:
“It’s been a tradition in our politics to put things behind us. On the other hand you have to look at how bad was it?”
Yes, the depiction of Hillary Clinton’s corruption, as portrayed by the right-wing smear machine, did indeed look pretty bad. It also looked divorced from reality for anyone not living in a far-right media bubble. But for the dedicated audiences of the GOP’s Big Lie narrative, it’s not all that surprising that they might still be thinking about prosecuting her. After all, Trump repeatedly told the nation that Hillary Clinton “may be the most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency”. Banana Republic here we come! Don’t forget that the FBI is infested with Breitbart fans so who knows what kind of zany this is going to go. Especially after the House GOP joins in on the fun:
“I’m not out to get her...but I am here to find the truth and make sure that it never happens again.”
Bwah! Wow, the next four years is just going to be one long troll ride. One long white supremacist troll ride. But at least it will be completely clear that the GOP is fully on board with Trump’s Banana Republic agenda.
Now, is all this talk coming from the GOP just preparing Trump’s base for an eventual let down or are Trump and the GOP really going to go through with this and make prosecuting your opponent a new American precedent. That’s not obvious at this point, but keep something in mind: the wrecking-ball nature of Trump’s GOP austerity agenda is guaranteed to make life a lot worse for huge swathes of Trump’s voting base. The wealthy Trump base will obviously get lots of government goodies, but average Trump voters are about to have to hopes for a better economic future and functional government services basically destroyed, and that means the only ‘positive’ accomplishments Trump and the GOP will realistically be able accomplish is the persecution of liberals and minorities. That’s about it. Sure, the evangelical base will be pleased by letting Mike Pence and the GOP roll back social policy back to the 1950’s. But for Trump’s non-evangelical supporters who can’t really be satisfied with the GOP’s traditional theocratic social agenda and who will be directly harmed by the GOP’s austerity agenda, ‘punching hippies’ is Trump’s main source of enduring appeal.
So for all the warnings to Trump about how prosecuting Hillary could backfire, don’t neglect the fact that not doing things like persecuting Hillary really does deprive Trump of one of the primary political ‘gifts’ had can give to his base. And he’s going to need to give a lot of ‘gifts’ of that nature to give considering that all almost all the fiscal gifts are going to the super-wealthy and giant banks. It’s one of many reasons we really can’t rule the prosecution and jailing of Hillary out. It’s also one of the many reasons the Trump administration’s use of the justice department to destroy his opponent probably isn’t going to end with Hillary. Or elected Democrats for that matter. Given how destructive the Trump/GOP agenda is going to be to the lives of his supporters, he’s going to have to jail a lot more enemies than just elected Democrats.
Now that Donald Trump won the 2016 election after spending most of his campaign constantly asserting that there was going to be massive voter fraud and vote rigging, it’s worth noting that one of the few potentially positive outcomes of a Trump administration is the possibility that we’ll see an increased public awareness of the decrepit and absurdly insecure electronic voting machines still in use today. After all, the bogus election day exit-polling operation set up Trump’s dirty trickster Roger Stone was predicated on the assumption that there was going to be massive pro-Democrat electronic voting hacking. After Trump made that scenario a key theme of his campaign there’s basically no excuse for a Trump administration to not push for either replacing all those old, unreliable machines with new secure machines or, ideally, ditching them altogether and returning paper ballots.
So it will be interesting to see if electronic voting machines are even mentioned by the Trump administration. It will also be interesting to see if there actually is a Trump administration given the new reports by election experts of evidence hinting towards major pro-Trump voting machine hacking in key swing states:
““Examining the physical evidence in these states—even if it finds nothing amiss—will help allay doubt and give voters justified confidence that the results are accurate,” Halderman wrote. “It will also set a precedent for routinely examining paper ballots, which will provide an important deterrent against cyberattacks on future elections. Recounting the ballots now can only lead to strengthened electoral integrity, but the window for candidates to act is closing fast.””
That’s a critical point here: Even if there’s no hacking discovered, and even if there are plenty of doubts coming from other experts as to whether or not these findings actually point towards hacking, there’s no reason not to investigate these claims because otherwise the Trump administration is going be dogged by claims that it stole the election for the rest of his term.
So while everyone is waiting to see if the Clinton campaign officially calls for an investigation, don’t forget that the Trump administration has an incentive to see these claims investigated too after spending a year shrieking about how Hillary was going to steal the election. Sure, the GOP as a party probably doesn’t care if Trump’s legacy is tainting with suspicions that Trump’s team, or some third party, stole the election for Trump. But Trump presumably cares, doesn’t he? As he must realize, the lower his popularity ratings go, the more these unresolved issues are going to take hold in the mind of the electorate. Does the Cheater in Chief not care if he’s seen as a Cheater in Chief?
So while it’s doubtful that these claims will really get investigated or lead to anything as dramatic as a reversal of the election outcome, and it’s very possible that there are other explanations for these observed anomalies, there’s really no reason this story should be dropped even after Trump is sworn into office if this isn’t investigated. Along with all the other questions raised about electronic voting machines over the last dozen years that somehow don’t get adequately investigated.
Wow, here’s something you don’t see every day: Fox News actually retracted story. But before give credit were credit’s due it’s important to recognize the moral bankruptcy that preceded this particular retraction. It’s also important to not that Fox News isn’t actually apologizing for that moral bankruptcy. In other words, it’s a grudging ‘sorry, not sorry’ retraction.
So what got retracted? Well, it was a report based on the claims of Rod Wheeler, a private investigator hired by a third party on behalf of the family of Seth Rich, the DNC staffer whose murder in 2016 led to speculation that he was actually the source of the hacked Democratic National Committee emails. According to Wheeler, he had inside sources in the FBI telling him that Seth Rich had indeed been in contact with Wikileaks. The Rich family immediately decried the report, calling it false and smear on Seth’s name. But Fox News stuck by the story. And get promoting it, along with Drudge, Breitbart, and much of the rest of the far-right media complex. Until the next day, when Wheeler admitted he had no actual insider FBI source but instead learned about this ‘revelation’ from another Fox News reporter. At that point Fox News
retracted in embarassment...kept pushing the story, with Sean Hannity aggressively pushing it. But now, a week later, Fox News finally retracted it (without an apology).So, yes, while a Fox News retraction isn’t something you see very often, Fox News acting like a shameless propaganda outfit designed to mislead and confuse its audience is indeed something you see basically every day. So while it was hard to see some elements of this story coming, others were all to familiar:
“The network did not apologize and said it “will continue to investigate this story.””
Oh great, so it sounds like we can expect more ‘investigative updates’ from Fox News about the Seth Rich murder mystery. Updates with Fox News reporters as sources:
Yes, the big revelation by Washington, D.C. Fox affiliate WTTG that an FBI source confirmed that Seth Rich was in contact with Wikileaks came from a reporter at Fox News. So when Fox News tells us that it “will continue to investigate this story,” that should probably be taken as a warning.
So when should we expect the next big Fox News ‘scoop’ on the Seth Rich story? Well, based on Wheeler’s comments clarifying his sources, it sounds like we should expect a new fake story the next time Fox News wants to use a local affiliate to promote one of its stories. Because, yes, Wheeler said that he thought the reason Fox had him make these fake comments was to promote “the Fox News story”. And what was that Fox News story about? Oh yeah, it was about the statements that Wheeler made to the local Fox affiliate that he had an FBI contact telling him Rich was in email contact with Wikileaks. And then shortly after this admission of guilt, Wheeler was back on Sean Hannity’s show promoting the same story:
“Late Tuesday, Wheeler told BuzzFeed News he knew about possible emails linking Rich and WikiLeaks because of a FoxNews.com story by reporter Malia Zimmerman. Wheeler, who is also a Fox News contributor, said he doesn’t know who her source is and hadn’t personally seen any evidence suggesting that Rich leaked emails to WikiLeaks.”
So what was Wheeler’s explanation? He was merely trying to promote Malia Zimmerman’s now-retracted Fox News story:
And yet Wheeler was on a local Fox affiliate stating unequivocally that he has an FBI source:
Now, it’s important to point out the the Fox News report by Malia Zimmerman (which was based on the local Fox affiliate report) did indeed claim to have an anonymous federal source claiming that a forensic FBI report of Rich’s laptop found ties to Wikileaks. But that information was only added later to the report. The initial Fox News report (or at least the first one captured by archive.org early in the morning) on May 16th contains no mention of this FBI source. But later in the day (presumably after many questions about the veracity of Wheeler’s claims) we find the claims of an anonymous federal source. So if Wheeler is asserting that “he knew about possible emails linking Rich and WikiLeaks because of a FoxNews.com story by reporter Malia Zimmerman,” it would be interesting to learn which story he’s referring to since there don’t appear to be any other stories by Malia Zimmerman claiming to have an FBI source in the Seth Rich murder.
So unless Fox New reporter Malia Zimmerman really an FBI source telling her they have evidence of the Rich/Wikileaks emails it sure looks like Fox News was completely fabricating this story. Is that believable? Well, first, of course, this is Fox News we’re talking about. Of course it’s possible. And the fact that Fox News has Wheeler continuing to openly promote this story even after he made this admission is a pretty strong sign that, yes, Fox News has no qualms at all about any of this:
“I don’t know for sure, I don’t know as a matter of fact if the emails went out to the WikiLeaks or anybody else,” Wheeler told Sean Hannity. “But it sure appears that way.”
So, to summarize, the day after Fox News pushed a story that it appears to have completely fabricated, the source for that story, Rod Wheeler, admitted he was lying about his sources and his real source was the Fox News story by Malia Zimmerman. That story by Zimmerman, however, was a story that was yet to be written after Wheeler made his claims since Zimmerman’s report was based on the local Fox affiliate story about Wheeler’s (fake) claims. And then Fox and much of the right-wing media kept pushing the story after this was exposed. Including Wheeler. And finally, a week later, Fox grudgingly retracted the story, offered no apology, and pledged to continue investigating the Seth Rich murder mystery.
And in other news, Sean Hannity is still pushing the story.
Guess who claims to not only know that Seth Rich was indeed the source of the DNC hacks but also claims that he was involved with the whole operation:
Yes, Kim Dotcom told Sean Hannity on twitter just a few days ago that “I was involved” with the leaking of those documents. And, yes, this claim took place a few days after Fox News published the now-debunked story claiming an FBI source confirmed to a Fox News reporter that FBI analysis of Rich’s laptop indicated communications with Wikileaks, but a few days before Fox News formally retracted the story. And the day before he made this tweet he asked Google to release Rich’s Gmail account information and later that day claimed he was will to “give written testimony with evidence” that Rich was behind the DNC hack. So right in the middle of a week when Fox News was aggressively promoting a fabricated story we get Kim Dotcom claiming to have evidence of Rich’s involvement in the hack.
And then, as the article below describes, after Fox News finally retracts its story on Tuesday of this week — a week after publishing it and nearly a week after it was debunked — Dotcom simply posted a message on his website saying he knows Rich was behind the DNC hack and offered to give his full statement to US authorities after a “guarantee from Special Counsel [Robert S.] Mueller, on behalf of the United States, of safe passage from New Zealand to the United States and back.”
How are we supposed to interpret this? Well, as the article below also describes, there was an apparent hacking attempt on Seth Rich’s Gmail account earlier this week. An apparent hacking attempt that appears to have come from Kim Dotcom’s Mega.com website after Seth Rich’s Gmail account received an email from welcome@mega.nz welcoming to a new account on Kim Dotcom’s MEGA file-sharing website. The email contained a link to click on to verify the account and had they clicked on that link they could have given someone access to Rich’s Gmail account according to experts working with the Rich family.
So if Kim Dotcom was really, really intent on providing evidence that Seth Rich was in contact with Wikileaks, hacking his Gmail account would probably be a good way to find it. Or plant it. At the same time, attempting some sort of hack on Rich’s Gmail account via an apparent phishing attempt designed to trick the Rich family into accepting an unsolicited account at one of Kim Dotcom’s companies just days after Kim Dotcom called for Google to release Rich’s Gmail account and then later claiming that he actually possessed such evidence is a really, really odd hacking attempt. Odd in the sense that it’s hard to imagine a more self-implicating hack by Kim Dotcom than a hack that originates from an unsolicited mega.nz email account.
Who knows how exactly to interpret this, but it looks like there’s an additional hack, or hacking attempt in this case, that we get to add to the list of seemingly self-implicating hacks related to the 2016 elections:
“According to experts and Rich’s family, the emailed invitation from welcome@mega.nz appeared to be an attempt to gain access to Rich’s email. Joel Rich, who maintains his late son’s Gmail account, did not click the link. Meanwhile, Dotcom was promising on Twitter to prove that the younger Rich had been in contact with WikiLeaks — and Fox News host Sean Hannity was telling his 2.37 million Twitter followers to be ready for a revelation.”
(We covered Kim Dotcom in FTR #812.
So did Kim Dotcom seriously try to hack Seth Rich’s Gmail account using a mega.nz phishing attempt just days after first calling for Google to open up Rich’s Gmail account and then claiming he already possessed such evidence? Like, seriously, did he really do that? Hopefully the Rich family can release that email or somehow make it available for additional security experts to study it and at least get clarification on how easy it is to attribute this hacking attempt to someone. For instance, did the verification link in the email go to some random fake website, like mega-upload.nz instead of mega.nz, or something like that? Did the verification email even come from mega.nz? Could this have been someone signing up for a new MEGA account who input Seth Rich’s email address as the verification address? If that’s case it would probably be more harassment than a hacking attempt. But if this was a real phishing attempt that would have given the hacker access to Seth Rich’s Gmail account and this really was being done by Kim Dotcom, this is either some sort of self-attribution-to-deflect-blame ploy using reverse psychology or, wow, is this sloppy.
Either way, given all the indications that the DNC/Jonn Podesta hacks were done by someone intent on leaving “I’m a Russian hacker!” hints, and given Kim Dotcom’s clear intent on ending public interest in the investigations into the 2016 hacks, it’s looking like we should probably add Kim Dotcom to the 2016 hack suspect list.
Aaron Nevin, a former aide to a GOP Florida state senator told the Wall Street Journal that the Democratic party documents that he posted on his blog back in August were indeed obtained from “Guccifer 2.0”. Not exactly a shocker. Although the fact that he admitted to not only receiving the documents but he actually reached out and asked for them and then stated that, while he wasn’t convinced that “Guccifer 2.0” was a Russian government hacker, he wouldn’t see any problem with using those documents even if that was the case was kind of shocking:
“Nevins admits that he propositioned the hacker Guccifer 2.0 for the files privately on Twitter; “I just threw an arrow in the dark,” he said. (US intelligence chiefs say Guccifer 2.0 is an attribution front for a Russian-backed hacking group, but there are some noteworthy reasons to dispute that.) What Guccifer 2.0 sent in response was a proverbial goldmine.”
And what was that goldmine of data?
So when you hear the GOP’s bizarre refrain that ‘the hacks didn’t affect the election’, keep in mind that the impact wasn’t limited to how the released hacked info may have changed the public’s opinion.
At the same time, also keep in mind that, while it’s widely assumed that “Guccifer 2.0” is a Russian government hack who was just pretending to be a Romanian hacker, if that’s true it’s got to be one of the worst intelligence operations in history unless it in involved a reverse-psychology self-implication ploy:
“In the same interview, when forced to answered questions in Romanian, he used such clunky grammar and terminology that experts believed he was using an online translator.”
““They might be making sure they are leveraging proxy infrastructure within their own borders,” said Rich Barger, ThreatConnect director of threat intelligence.”
Yes, in order to avoid the possiblity of the US cracking the anonymity of the proxy-server Guccifer 2.0 use so as to maintain the “I’m Romanian who doesn’t speek Russian” cover story, the Russian intelligence services didn’t decide to use a Romanian speaker to communicate with the world but instead used a crappy translation service so the person would not seem Romanian at all.
And then they used a Russian VPN with a Russian-language sign-up page and internet addresses on the VPN only known to be used by “a select, criminal clientele in the past, including text message scammers”...in order maintain the “I’m a Romanian who can’t speak Romanian” cover:
““They might be making sure they are leveraging proxy infrastructure within their own borders,” said Rich Barger, ThreatConnect director of threat intelligence.”
Those Russian intelligence services sure are tricky! Especially how they filled the leaked documents with Cyrillic characters. Again, if this isn’t part of some sort of Russian intelligence reverse-psychology self-implication ploy designed to discredit Russian hacker suspicions by mimicking an implausibly horrible degree of tradecraft for a highly sensitive operation, this has got to be one of the worst intelligence operations in history. Or else the Russian government wants to take the blame, which is a odd move when backing a Manchurian candidate.
Regardless, we now have a GOP operative proudly claiming that they reached out to Guccifer 2.0, got invaluable documents, and they wouldn’t have cared whether they were Russian government hackers or not. In the ‘please charge me with something, anything!’ category of GOP behavior, it looks like Donald Trump’s obstruction of justice in the Russia probe has some serious competition.
There was another twist in Kim Dotcom’s ‘investigation’ into the Seth Rich murder. A twist with plenty of spin. So Kim Dotcom just tweeted out a document that’s allegedly from the FBI demonstrating that Seth Rich was indeed the source of the hacked DNC emails. The twist is that the document is a blatant fraud and Kim Dotcom acknowledges that but decided to tweet it out anyway. The spin is Dotcom’s assertions that there’s no need to delete the tweet promoting the fake document because, hey, he put up some subsequent tweets questioning their authenticity. Twist & spin.
But there was another rather intriguing admission by Dotcom in the following interview asking him why he tweeted out documents he knew were fake: Dotcom is continuing to assert that he has evidence Rich was the source of the DNC hacks. He’s just not ready to reveal it yet but he strongly hints that the evidence has to do with his close ties to Wikileaks. And then he refers back to a Bloomberg TV interview he did on May 13th, 2015, where Dotcom predicts that Julian Assange is going to be Hillary Clinton’s “worst nightmare” in the upcoming election. How so? Because, says Dotcom, Assange “has access to information,” without going into specifics. And while it’s possible that Wikileaks was sitting on a bunch of old pre-2015 emails that could be embarrassing to Hillary, we didn’t really old emails getting leaked during the campaign although the range of emails released on the DNC leak went from January 2015 to May 2016. That raises the question as to whether or not Wikileaks, or something associated with them (Dotcom, perhaps?) had already hacked the DNC’s servers when Dotcom gave that interview and were just watching and collecting info. Don’t forget that when Dotcom gave that interview it was a month after Hillary Clinton officially entered the race but before Donald Trump even announced and months before and the FBI reportedly first discovered the DNC server hacking in September of 2015 (that it allowed to continue until May of 2016) and Crowdstrike’s subsequent report on the hacking states that the “intrusion” of the DNC’s network was identified going back to the summer of 2015:
That May 13, 2015 interview Dotcom gave to Bloomberg is awfully close to the date Crowdstrike gave for the first DNC network breach. Sure, May isn’t quite “summer”, but it’s close so it would be interesting to know how confident Crowdstrike is of that “summer 2015” date. Might the DNC intrusions have started a little earlier?
So in an interview where Kim Dotcom continues to assert that he has evidence that Seth Rich was the hacked DNC email source, Dotcom then refers to a May 2015 interview — long before Seth Rich would have been in a position to pass along emails or even a motive if he really was a disillusioned Bernie-crat but shortly before Crowdstrike found concluded when the DNC was initially hacked — where Dotcom confidently asserts that Julian Assange already had a bunch of dirt on Hillary and was going to be her worst nightmare. And yet we didn’t really see any old embarrassing emails emerge from Wikileaks during the campaign. Along with being incredibly sleazy it’s all rather curious:
“The document is obviously fake to anyone who’s looked at real FBI files. For one thing, the FBI doesn’t use black to redact information, it uses white boxes. And much more damningly, the redactions include partial words and partial dates, as well as the partial redaction of its classification stamp, things that would never be done.”
The document is obviously fake, which Dotcom readily admits. And yet he tweeted it anyway while continuing to assert that he has inside knowledge that Rich was the source of the hacked emails. And how does he possess this inside knowledge? His close ties to Wikileaks, as indicated by a May 2015 interview where Dotcom talks about how he knows that Assange has a bunch of dirt on Hillary:
“The Bloomberg interview Dotcom is referring to is from May 13, 2015, wherein he said that Assange would be “Clinton’s worst nightmare.” At this point, Clinton had just announced her candidacy a month earlier and Donald Trump hadn’t even entered the race yet”
Isn’t that something. Granted, it’s hard to take anything Kim Dotcom says seriously and it’s not like it would have been difficult to predict that Wikileaks was going to have a number of Hillary-related documents it had already received pre-2015. Still, given everything we know now, that was a pretty prescient interview.
It’s all a reminder of how potent faked documents can be in this age of the Great Hack. Sure, in this case the documents were easily identified as fakes, but there’s no reason to assume that’s always the case. Although even when a hacked document is identified as fake, that doesn’t mean the fake documents can’t still wreak havoc. For example...:
“Sources close to Comey tell CNN he felt that it didn’t matter if the information was accurate, because his big fear was that if the Russians released the information publicly, there would be no way for law enforcement and intelligence officials to discredit it without burning intelligence sources and methods. There were other factors behind Comey’s decision, sources say”
Yep. The historic decision by FBI director James Comey to hold a press conference to announce that the FBI wasn’t going to be prosecuting Hillary over her private email server while he continued to trash her for being “extremely careless” was prompted by a report from a Russian intelligence source describing an email which would have compromised the independence of the Department of Justice that the FBI knew was fake. No one even had the email. The FBI just had a description of the email from this source and assumed that it hadn’t been dispersed in the initial leaks. At least initially, before it concluded that it was fake. But even after it concluded the email didn’t exist, the sheer terror that the Russian government might eventually leak this fake email was allegedly used as an excuse for that historic press conference.
And yet somehow the fake/non-existent status of this email was never brought to the attention of congress. Even during classified hearings:
“Still, Comey did not let on to lawmakers that there were doubts about the veracity of the intelligence, according to sources familiar with the briefings.It is unclear why Comey was not more forthcoming in a classified setting.”
Behold, the power of fake documents. They don’t even have to exist to exert their influence. Although if they do exist and are blatant forgeries then they may not have very much influence, as Kim Dotcom now knows. He should probably just stick to vague hints of possessing evidence that he’s never able to reveal for some mysterious reason. It’s clearly a much more effective technique.
Kim Dotcom upped the ante on his quest to ‘prove’ that Seth Rich, the DNC staffer who was murdered days before the Wikileaks release of the DNC’s emails, was the source of those leaks: Dotcom is claiming that he was contacted by a person going by the moniker “Panda” — said to be Rich’s favorite animal — back in 2014 who said they worked at the DNC and talked to Dotcom about starting a US branch of Dotcom’s “Internet Party”. Panda also allegedly told Dotcom of his plans to leak DNC content exposing corruption in 2015. That’s the essence of what Dotcom is claiming.
And Dotcom reportedly offered Robert Mueller — the special counsel investigating the Trump/Russia collusion investigation — his willingness to testify to all this in the US, as long as the Justice Departments cuts him a deal that he won’t be detained if he travels to the US (the US has been seeking his extradition since 2012 for a variety of charges). Dotcom claims to have evidence of all this too. But here’s the thing: he’s only offering “verbal testimony”. Yep:
“ ‘He’s offering to give testimony, and in terms of the details, that will have to be discussed at the appropriate time with whoever does the investigation,’ said Rothken. ‘We’re specifically not commenting on the range of materials that could be provided. That will be dealt with properly with the investigators in the special counsel’s office.’ ”
So Dotcom offered Robert Mueller “testimony” in exchange for a deal that would avoid his arrest. And then hinted of further documentary evidence that could be provided upon further negotiation. He’s clearly investing heavily in this storyline so, unless he really does have some sort of evidence (or fabricates some), it looks like the “Seth Rich was murdered by Hillary for being the leaker which is totally proven by Kim Dotcom”-meme is not only going to become a permanent fixture of contemporary and future incidents of Clinton Derangement Syndrome but will probably flower into all sorts of different narrative that Dotcom and others feed with vague hints in coming months and years. Vague hints like the one Dotcom hinted at about how “Panda” told him in 2015 of his plans to leak the DNC documents:
We’ll see if Mueller bites. It doesn’t seem likely considering both the lack of Dotcom’s credibility or evidence he’s willing to provide and the seemingly singular focus of Mueller’s probe on Russia (as opposed to, say, a non-Russian hacker hired by Roger Stone or something). But it’s pretty clear right-wing media is going to keep biting on Dotcom’s nuggets of ‘testimony’, given its seemingly insatiable appetite for this storyline already and the long-held appetite for seemingly any storyline that promotes the ‘Clinton Body Count’ narrative and portrays Hillary and ‘Killary’:
“In death, Rich has become a martyr to the right, buoyed by a host of characters each with their own ulterior motives: There is WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who wants to downplay the connections between WikiLeaks and the Russians; there are the Clinton haters, who want to spread the idea that the Clintons are murderers; there are the Trump supporters, who want to minimize the idea that Russian hackers helped deliver the election to their candidate; and there are the talking heads on Fox News, who last week needed something other than negative Trump stories to make conversation about.”
Yep, on top of the obvious incentive to promote the hell out of this “Seth Rich was the leaker” narrative in light of the DNC hacking and the need to confuse that investigation, the way it plays into the “Clinton Body Count” narrative that the far-right has been promoting for decades makes this case absolutely irresistible to the US right-wing media complex. And given how it’s already been repeatedly endorsed by right-wing figures like Newt Gingrich and outlets like Fox News, we will be probably be hearing about “how Hillary had Seth Rich killed in revenge for the leaks and to cover up all the DNC corruption”-meme for decades to come. A permanent fixture of the American ‘common wisdom disinformation’ landscape. Despite all the problems with that narrative...like how, if this was a ‘hit’ on Rich, the hitmen didn’t even bother to make it look like a regular mugging by taking Rich’s valuables and how that part of DC had seen 24 armed robberies with gun within a quarter-mile of that street corner in 2016 alone:
Of course, it’s possible that the DC police will eventually release more details on the ongoing investigation that conclusively debunks these narratives. After all, we still have no idea what Rich said during the few hours after he was shot and was reportedly very talkative:
Maybe one day Seth Rich’s own last words will finally be released to help put an end to the new Dotcom/Wikileaks/right-wing media cottage industry of Seth Rich theories. But in the mean time, we should probably expect a growing chorus of “Killary Killed Seth Rich!” chants across the right-wing media complex.
So, since speculation about Seth Rich’s murder is still a ‘hot topic’ thanks to the work of Fox News, Dotcom, and Wikileaks, it’s probably worth noting that, when we put all the known facts on this case together, if we’re looking for the likeliest culprit on who might have had a political motive to kill Seth Rich, shouldn’t we be looking at the Trump campaign/GOP?
Seriously. After all, look at just how perfectly Rich’s death worked to both fuel their anti-Hillary disinformation campaign and act as a smokescreen for the origins of the hacking. Don’t forget that Rich was murdered on July 10th, the DNC leaks were released by Wikileaks on July 22nd, and the Democratic National Convention was July 25–28. So even if Hillary really is a murderous Illuminati witch queen, would she have really had Rich murdered in such a suspicious way just two weeks before that convention? That seems like horrible timing.
But if you’re, say, a Trump campaign operative who knows the DNC was hacked because that was already widely reported in June — meaning you know a big leak is probably coming and you know there’s going to be extensive speculation on who did the leak — doesn’t is make a lot of Machiavellian sense to have a young DNC staffer murdered in such a suspicious manner (no items taken...not a great hitman) just two weeks before the DNC convention? In terms of timing and motive, the idea that this was a GOP hit, intended to both confuse the hacking investigation while promoting the “Clinton Body Count” narrative, right before the DNC convention really does align with the Trump campaign’s interests more than any other faction in this murder mystery.
Granted, there’s no evidence that the Trump campaign/GOP was behind Rich’s murder. But since we’re all speculating about it...
Along those speculative lines, you know how Trump kept referring to how the real hacker might have been a 400 pound guy sitting in his bed...are we sure Kim Dotcom doesn’t have an additional motive to cloud that hacking investigation?
@Pterrafractyl–
Eclipsed in the long, tortuous discussion of Kim Dotcom etc. is the fact that Craig Murray, former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, claims he conveyed the DNC material to WikiLeaks via a flash drive and that he got it “from a disgusted DNC insider.”
I suspect that, if he is being truthful, that was good ol’ Tulsi Gabbard, a left-cover fascist and Bernie Bot.
Do NOT lose sight of Murray’s claim.
Best,
Dave
@Dave: There was an interesting piece by Robert Parry back in December discussing a particularly chilling scenario that Parry based on one of his intelligence sources: that senior intelligence officials really hated both Trump and Hillary and wanted to see both of them no where near the White House. The overall plan in the scenario Parry describes would be an intelligence community plot to first take down Hillary while setting Trump up for a later take down while framing Russia to guarantee no future normalization of relations.
Parry’s speculation relies heavily on the claims of Craig Murray and how they would play into Parry’s ‘spy coup’ scenario. In particular, Parry relies on an interview Murray gave to the Scott Horton radio show where Murray goes into greater detail about his alleged interaction with these leakers. And it’s a pretty important interview in terms of
clarifying Murray’s claims because it strongly suggests that, even if we accept what Murray says as truthful, the person he allegedly met in the woods in DC was someone involved with the Podesta emails and NOT the DNC emails and he is basing his DNC email leaker claims purely on the word of Julian Assange.
Murray states that there was actually two separate leakers. For the DNC emails he says is was a disgruntled DNC insider. But for the Podesta email leaks Murray simply says that it was an American with access to the information while pointing out that the Podesta, as a lobbyist for the Saudi government, probably would have had his emails monitored by the US spy agencies, implying that someone in the US intelligence community was actually behind the Podesta emails leaks. And based on the information Murray provides it would strongly suggest that the person he allegedly met was a Podesta email leaker. How so? Well, Parry’s piece notes that Murray denies in the interview (~5:30) that when he met with mystery person in the woods in DC that he was receiving a fresh batch of leaks that was reported elsewhere(like in the DailyMail). Murray states in the interview that he did not receive new leaks during that meeting in the woods and that he is pretty confident that Wikileaks already received them. Murray doesn’t go on to describe why exactly he was meeting this person but merely leaves is at, “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September...I had a small role to play.”
So why does that strongly point towards Murray meeting this hypothetical Podesta leaker? Because this alleged meeting in the woods happened on September 25, months after the DNC emails were already released to the public (and Seth Rich was murdered) but only about two weeks before the release of the Podesta emails. So of course Wikileaks would have already received the DNC emails...they already leaked them. But they hadn’t yet released the Podesta emails. Plus, is there’s a compelling reason why the DNC email leaker (or a representative of the leaker...Murray suggests that the person he met may have be a representative of a leaker) would want to meet with Murray, someone known to be closely associated with Wikileaks, in Washington DC? Was there was lots of money exchanged or something. But it’s not nearly as hard to imagine that a Podesta email leaker/representative would want to meet with Murray a couple weeks before the big release although it’s still kind of hard to understand since the Podesta leaker apparently had other means of communicating with Wikileaks other than via Murray. And again, this is all assuming there’s any truth to Murray’s claims.
But here’s another twists to Murray’s claims about a meeting in the woods: that meeting apparently happened in the woods near American University during an awards ceremony for former CIA officer John Kiriakou. Kiriakou was being honored by the “Sam Adams Associates”, a group of former Western intelligence officials. And according to Ray McGovern, one of the attendees of the event, Murray was m‑c-ing the event, but then he slipped away during the reception following the awards ceremony. So in September — a time when DC was fully engulfed in speculation about Russian hacks and Wikileaks — Murray, a known Wikileaks representative, traveled to DC to meet with dissident intelligence agents, he m‑c-ed the event, and then slipped away during the reception to meet with a leaker in the woods...a leaker who was probably a Podesta email leaker and therefore probably within the intelligence community. It’s quite a claim:
“Murray has disputed a report in London’s Daily Mail that he was receiving a batch of the leaked Democratic emails. “The material, I think, was already safely with WikiLeaks before I got there in September,” Murray said in the interview with Scott Horton. “I had a small role to play.””
That sure sounds like Murray is claiming he met with a Podesta without saying it explicitly.
And regarding Seth Rich, Murray gives the interesting answer that, while he definitely isn’t saying that Seth Rich was the DNC email source, he does think it’s very reasonable of Wikileaks to think that Seth Rich was killed by someone who thought Seth Rich was the source:
And while that might sound like Murray is hinting, without explicitly saying, that Julian Assange knows Seth Rich was the source, keep in mind that what he said wasn’t actually revelatory at all. All he said was that it’s not unreasonable to assume that Assange may have wondered if Seth Rich was killed by someone who assumed Rich was the source. It’s not like that’s some sort of exotic speculation given the circumstances. Large swaths of the internet jumped to the exact same conclusion.
And what about all the reports about the hacking? Let’s not forget the reports of the sad saga of the FBI’s flaccid warnings to the DNC that it was hacked. Or the spear-phishing campaign against Podesta that went horribly awry due to a DNC IT person accidentally telling Podesta that the spear-phishing email was “legitimate” and not “illegitimate”. Is Murray claiming that those stories are fabricated or coincidental and not involved with actual leak? That’s unclear, but he does claim that in both cases the person responsible for getting that information to Wikileaks had no need to hack any computers because they had legal access to the information:
All in all, it appears that Murray is making no real claims based on personal experiences about the DNC leaker. Instead he’s falls back on Julian Assange’s assurances that the leaker was an American. But he is implying that he personally met with the Podesta email leaker (or representative) who Murray hints is a member of the US intelligence community. And he met this intelligence community member in DC right after m‑c-ing an awards ceremony for intelligence agents. And while he won’t say what the meeting in the woods was about, he did say that he didn’t actual receive any of the leaked emails during this meeting but instead played a “small role” in the whole operation.
Sure, there’s absolutely no evidence for any of this, with the exception of Ray McGovern confirming that Murray left the awards ceremony reception early. But if what Murray is claiming turns out to be true, and the Podesta emails really were released by someone in the intelligence community, it would be pretty chilling. Although not nearly as chilling as Robert Parry’s ‘spy coup’ scenario. Yikes. But perhaps about as chilling as how the FBI openly treated Hillary during the campaign in a manner that was blatantly and egregiously biased. Double yikes.
Here’s a rather bizarre followup to the rather bizarre story about the retracted Fox News piece about the murder of Seth Rich that claimed to have an FBI source who confirmed that Seth Rich’s laptop contained emails to Wikileaks:
Rod Wheeler, the Fox News commentator who was portrayed in the story as the person who in contact with the unnamed FBI source, is now suing Fox News for fabricating the quotes from Wheeler in the story where Wheeler said he was in contact with the FBI source and had confirmed the allegations. But it gets a lot messier than that. The primary person pushing the story was Ed Butowsky, a wealthy right-wing Trump supporter whose priar accomplishments include hyping up the Benghazi attack into a major scandal. According to Wheeler’s lawsuit, Butowsky had offered to pay Wheeler to ‘investigate’ Rich’s murder on behalf of Rich’s parents. And over the course of developing the story Wheeler and Butowsky actually met with former White House press secretary Sean Spicer on April 20, a month before the story’s publication. The lawsuit also includes a voicemail and text from Butowsky where Butwowsky tells Wheeler that Trump himself had reviewed drafts of the Fox News story and according to Wheeler is was those claims that were used to pressure him into going along with a story involving fabricated quotes. And Spicer admits the meeting took place, although he says the meeting was simply a favor for Butwosky and denies Trump had any knowledge of it.
And according to Wheeler’s lawsuit, the whole thing was concocted for the purpose of diffuse the Trump/Russia hacking narrative. And while it’s undoubtedly the case that the White House would have loved to see interest in the Trump/Russia story squashed, it’s important to keep in mind both the myriad of reasons to doubt the the official explanation of ‘Russian hackers’ being behind the stolen DNC documents coupled with the fact that the Trump team would have plenty of incentive to undermine the Trump/Russia story whether or not there was any collusion, especially if if the Trump team itself, or an allied group, was actually behind the hacks. The saying “the coverup is greater than the crime”, is actually literally true if the coverup helps propel us towards WWIII. And even if the Trump team had no actual involvement in the hacks, the fact that the Trump/Russia story triggered an open-ended investigation into Trump’s shady past is incentive enough for Trump to obsess about changing the narrative. So keep that all in mind while digesting this lawsuit that appears to give us a peak Fox News ‘making the sausage’:
“Butowsky weighs in: “One day you’re going to win an award for having said those things you didn’t say.” Later, according to the recordings transcribed in the suit, Butowsky acknowledges Wheeler hadn’t made any claims of personal knowledge about emails between Rich and WikiLeaks. “I know that’s not true,” Butowsky says. “If I’m under oath, I would say I never heard him say that.””
Well, if Ed Butowsky actually said that it’s pretty clear that quotes really were falsely attributed to Wheeler. Specifically, these two quotes:
And according to the lawsuit, Malia Zimmerman, the Fox News reporter who wrote the story, promised Wheeler the fabricated quotes would be removed but her bosses ordered her to leave the quotes in. And then she sends an email to Seth Rich’s parents blaming the whole story on Wheeler. Something she tells Wheeler her Fox News bosses ordered her to do:
And all of this was done with the full and eager knowledge of the White House, including President Trump, and was with Butowsky assertions that Trump wanted the story soon that intimidated Wheeler into going along with what he knew was a story fabricated story, according to Wheeler’s lawsuit:
So there was have it: as story about a whole bunch of people with no credibility asserting that the other side is the real liar in this case. Although despite the fact that Wheeler played along with a story he knew was fabricated after the story first broke, circumstantially it does seem like Wheeler’s story is probably the closest to the truth.
And note the person with actual credibility involved in this mess: Seymour Hersh:
“I hear gossip,” Hersh tells NPR on Monday. “[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it.”
So it sounds like this whole thing was triggered, in part, by Sy Hersh relaying some gossip to Butowsky about Rich’s laptop, which Butowsky, Fox News, and the White House subsequently engineered into the now discredited story. So that’s one more reason to avoid gossip. Especially gossiping to the guy who says his biggest claim to fame is hyping Benghazi.
And the Seth Rich murder mystery extravaganza just took another turn for the weird. Yep: First, recall the Fox News mini-scandal that recently erupted after long-time right-wing financier Ed Butowsky essentially concocted a story that ran on Fox News about an FBI source who was allegedly telling Rod Wheeler, a paid Fox News commentator, that Seth Rich’s laptop contained evidence that he was in contact with Wikileaks and then the whole story imploded after it was discovered that there was no FBI source. And then Wheeler sued Fox News alleging that Butowsky, Fox News, and maybe the White House essentially pressured Wheeler into pretending that he had this source when in reality he didn’t. And Seymour Hersh was one of the people Butowsky was apparently in contact with who talked to Butowsky about the rumors that such evidence did actually exist, but Hersh just dismissed it as ““I hear gossip...[Butowsky] took two and two and made 45 out of it.”.
Well, the Seymour Hersh angle to the story just got a lot more interesting. Because it turns out that Butowsky was apparently secretly taping his conversations with Hersh about that gossip and that taped conversation just appeared on a right-wing website called Big League Politics. And in that conversation Hersh doesn’t make it sound at all like he thinks its all a bunch of “gossip”. He talks about his own source in the FBI who confirmed for him that such an FBI report exists and also references an “NSA report” on the matter, indicating that the NSA got involved in confirming that Rich did indeed contact Wikileaks. On top of that, Hersh asserts that Rich’s primary motivation was money. At the same times, Hersh sees no indication that Rich’s murder was anything other than a coincidence that comes with the territory of living in a high-crime neighborhood.
And while Hersh has indicated since this tape was leaked that he isn’t planning on writing his own piece on the matter, he also isn’t denying the authenticity of the conversation. So, yeah, the Seth Rich murder mystery extravaganza just got a lot weirder:
““What I know comes off an FBI report. Don’t ask me how. You can figure it out, I’ve been around a long time,” Hersh says on the tape. “I have somebody on the inside who will go and read a file for me. This person is unbelievably accurate and careful, he’s a very high-level guy and he’ll do a favor. You’re just going to have to trust me.””
A “very high-level guy” at the FBI is apparently Hersh’s source for all that. So that’s one leaker the Trump administration is presumably fine with.
And according to this alleged source, Rich was indeed in contact with Wikileaks and wanted money. And while it’s unclear what exactly Hersh meant when he referenced and “NSA report”, it appears that he was saying the FBI source passed along to Hersh that the NSA confirmed these details about Rich’s activity to the FBI:
So that’s all rather remarkable. And at this point it’s just dangling out there, without Hersh providing any followup or clarification.
But perhaps one of the most intriguing aspects of this story is that it’s hard to see how President Trump isn’t going to learn about it. And if there is any truth to these internal FBI and NSA reports, it’s unclear why Trump couldn’t somehow make them public. And that’s part of what’s going to make this story something to watch: If these reports do exist, what are the odds that they won’t be leaked at some point. Sure, Trump is all anti-leaker these days, but this seems like the kind of leak he would be fine with. Or maybe he’ll just triumphantly declassified by Trump himself.
But if those reports never get leaked it’s kind of hard to believe they exist at all. After all, according to Rod Wheeler’s lawsuit, the White House itself was keenly interested in seeing that debunked Fox News story go public. A story about federal government agency documents that would essentially destroy the ‘Russian hackers’ narrative. Isn’t that something the Trump administration would really, really, really want to see released to the public? Is there something that would prevent the White House from getting that evidence released if it exists? These are the kinds of questions that, say, Seymour Hersh would be a good person to help answer. Or at least a journalist who isn’t working for a right-wing media organization. Oh well. This is where we are.
So there’s no shortage unanswered questions raised by all this and it’s very unclear where we’re going to get credible answers. Most of the media is avoiding this story like the plague and Hersh isn’t talking. And that leaves it to the right-wing disinfotainment sphere like Fox News and Big League Politics, entities so untrustworthy that the only thing you should trust them to do is deceive you. It’s a big reason why this mystery is sadly probably going to remain mystery.
@Pterrafractyl–
It isn’t a mystery, it is the same old Fresh Fertilizer in a different–though not very different–bucket. Nor is it “heating up,” although, if the Fertilizer were Fresh enough, it would be at body temperature, at least for a while.
Points of interest:
1‑Joe Lauria is a right wing journalist, habituating the likes of “The Wall Street Journal” and “The American Conservative.”
2‑Hersh’s sources are an unnamed FBI source–the same entity that was all in on the anti-Hillary effort from the get go–and an unnamed NSA source–which has been all in on the “Russia-did-it” nonsense on the high-profile hacks. (I suspect NSA is being blackmailed by CIA–with which Snowden and his assistant in his flight from Hawaii to Hong Kong Jacob Applebaum are affiliated–and Underground Reich behind it. Mid-level and “ex” NSA people have spoken candidly about how ridiculous the “Russia-did-it” propaganda is, but the agency as a whole buttresses the disinfo. They have to know it is nonsense.)
3‑AFTER Hersh is contacted by two anonymous sources from fundamentally compromised and discredited institutions, a right-wing financier meets with him, tapes him (apparently surreptitiously, which is illegal) and resuscitates the Seth Rich meme, one of the journalistic “Walking Dead” that people our political/intellectual landscape.
4‑Project Veritas is yet another right-wing media propaganda outfit. Same old, same old.
5‑Interesting that neither Hersh, nor the FBI has seen fit to look into the surreptitious taping of Hersh,which is illegal.
Also interesting is that NO ONE is looking into Tulsi Gabbard, the Hindutva fascist who was St. Bernard’s prospective VP candidate.
I would start any investigation there. She is a favorite of team Modi and team Bannon.
Best,
Dave
Here’s something that could present a fascinating test of whatever relationship Donald Trump and Julian Assange have following Assange’s invaluable contribution to the Trump 2016 election effort: the government of Ecuador repeatedly warned Julian Assange to stop publicly criticizing the Spanish government as the Catalonia secession crisis plays out. And Assange has vociferously rejected those warnings. So now the government of Ecuador is warning Assange that he might need to find a new living arrangement:
““The foreign minister of Ecuador Maria Fernanda Espinosa said they are seeking the mediation of a third country or personality so that Julian Assange can leave the embassy in London,” teleSUR’s Orlando Perez tweeted.”
Wanted: A third country or personality willing and able to safely escort Assange out of the London embassy. Any takers?
And who, exactly, would be the kind of “personality” that could pull this off? The Pope? How about President Trump? Well, if the Wikileaks’s statement reflects their current public attitude towards Trump, it doesn’t sound like Trump’s assistance is expected:
“The UK should not permit itself to be intimidated by the Trump administration’s public threats to ‘take down’ Mr. Assange.”
That’s a pretty caustic message directed at the Trump team at the very moment Assange could really use a little help from the guy he helped make the most powerful man in the world.
It’s also a very different sentiment from the one Assange himself tweeted back in December, when he predicted that the “Deep State” is still intent on taking down Trump and replacing him with Pence:
So Julian appears to still have concerns about Trump’s treatment. Will Trump reciprocate? Well, let’s not forget that Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared back in April that the arrest of Assange was a “priority”. So the US government hasn’t changed its stance. At least not officially. But what about unofficially? What does Trump actually feel about this? We might find out soon if Ecuador goes through with its plans.
In the mean time, it’s going to be interesting to watch how Assange manages to walk that line between trashing the Trump administration and courting Trump directly. Because the investigations in Trump that Assange was referring to in that tweet point towards a “ ‘Deep State’ vs Julian and Donald together” theme available for Assange to push. After all, if Trump can arrange for a place (without an extradition treaty with the US) to take in Assange, who knows, maybe Trump himself would be in need of such a place someday? There’s a potential synergy here. But it’s a very unseemly synergy which is part of what’s going to make this so interesting to see play out.
Here’s a rather interesting new claim regarding the murder of Seth Rich and the allegations that he was the Wikileaks source of the hacked DNC emails: Ed Butowsky, the wealthy right-wing Trump supporter who has been financing the various efforts to prove Rich was the source of those emails, was a guest on Rick Ungar’s radio show Wednesday. Recall that Butowsky was the individual who secretly recorded and release his conversation with Seymour Hersh where Hersh talks about his own sources inside the FBI that Rich was indeed the source for the the DNC emails but he was also killed during a random robbery that had nothing to do with the emails. Ungar is a left-wing host who makes a point of inviting conservative guests for interview and during this interview Butowsky made an assertion he’s never publicly made before regarding how he got involved in the whole Seth Rich story in the first place. According to Butowsky, in the fall of 2016, he was approached by Ellen Ratner. Ratner is the sister of Michael Ratner, who was Julian Assange’s civil liberties attorney at the time (he died in May of 2016). Ellen had just traveled to London to meet with Assange and when she returned she contacted Butowsky and told him that Assange had asked her to share something with Seth’s parents and she wanted Butowsky to actually deliver the message to them. She wanted Butowsky to tell them that Seth and his brother Aaron were the ones who sold the emails to Wikileaks. “That’s how I got involved,” according to Butowsky. So it’s going to be very interesting to hear Ellen Ratner’s response to what Butowsky just publicly alleged for the first time:
““Ellen Ratner met with [Assange] in the fall of 2016,” said Butowsky. “When she came back, she asked me to share something with [Seth Rich’s parents] Joel and Mary Rich, that Julian Assange wanted them to know. And that was that Seth and [his brother] Aaron Rich were the ones who sold the [DNC] emails to Wikileaks. That’s how I got involved.” Ellen Ratner could not be reached for comment.”
So Ed Butowsky goes on a left-wing radio show and claims a left-wing journalist told him that Assange told her that Seth and Aaron Rich were the sources of the DNC emails. That’s what Butowsky just publicly claimed for the first time. You can listen to the rest of the ~10 minute interview here. At ~5 minutes into the full interview Butowsky discusses Ratner contacting him on Assange’s behalf. Apparently Assange felt horrible about what happened to Seth and he wanted his parent’s to know about the role Seth played so they could find a way to have his murder thoroughly investigated.
According to Butowsky, when he told Rich’s parents about this their response was that they already knew Seth and Aaron were the sources of the emails and their main focus was on who killed him. Rich’s parents also asked Butowsky to keep this admission on their part quiet. Given that Rich’s parents have already sued Butowsky for intentional infliction of emotional distress in 2018 that’s quite a public assertion on Butowsky’s part, although that suit was eventually dismissed.
Ellen Ratner has yet to comment on the story. Given that she’s a left-wing journalist it’s going to be harder to dismiss this as just more right-wing disinformation if she does back up Butowsky’s claims. But even if Ratner does end up backing up the claims she’s still just recounting what Julian Assange told her and he’s not exactly a trust-worthy figure on these matters.
Also keep in mind that “Guccifer 2.0” was publicly offering stolen documents in June of 2016, before Rich’s murder and before Wikileaks first started releasing documents and “Guccifer 2.0” continue interacting with the public long after Rich’s murder. So unless Seth’s brother Aaron was also acting as “Guccifer 2.0” this whole time there were clearly other people involved even if Seth and Aaron Rich really were part of this.